It's one of the reasons I feel these scale highlighting things can be like deficient training wheels. They seem useful for beginners, at first, but they end up locking you in and making you think of everything in terms of "allowed notes" and "disallowed notes" like it's an immutable binary rule. It makes it harder to temporarily visit another key or borrow a chord when this kind of feature is enabled, so you just... end up not doing those things. Even though they're perhaps the most interesting and useful benefit of a priori scales.
I feel like if you're learning the parts of western songwriting/composition where you'd care about choosing specific scales, but then not want to freely interchange between scales or modes or borrow chords, would be a span of your learning journey measured in a few weeks, at most. The next thing you'd want to do after learning about modes is interchange them or interpret them as a different mode. Any tool that makes this difficult is not good, in my opinion. Requiring something like DAW automation in a separate view or lane to manage it feels too cumbersome. I dunno, just my rant.
I love music theory features, but these scale highlight/lock things have never seemed good to me.
Fortunately, most DAWs let you disable the feature and ignore it, so it never bothers me, and the people who like the feature can enjoy it. Except for Bitwig 6, which always has it enabled in the transport bar, with no way to turn it off, for some reason. Yeah, I already filed feedback for it in beta 1, and I hope more people do, too. Wait, I think I already posted a message like this.
If I want to play in B minor, for example, I transpose up 2 semitones. My keyboard has dedicated buttons for it. Or I can use a MIDI FX device in Bitwig (or whatever DAW.) And then the white keys in the piano roll are always in scale (for major/minor natural and their modes) in case you don't want to memorize which notes are in each scale. In Bitwig you could even put one on every instrument track, then modulate them all by a single project master macro knob, and change the key of everything at once. Hey, that sounds even better than the scales feature.
