> Step by step

Getting started with RF Music Scale Player CM

1 Once you’ve downloaded Scale Player CM, installation is a simple matter of dragging the VST and/or Component files into their correct folders on your system. The MIDI plugin loads up as an instrument in your DAW, although it produces no sound – rather, it’ll be routed to a track that does. Check your DAW’s manual for how to do this.

2 Try and play your MIDI keyboard now, and you’ll probably fail spectaularly! Scale Player CM has a different way of doing things. To get it right, locate the MIDI note A5 on your keyboard or in your DAW’s piano roll and play that. You’ll see in the very centre of the interface that A5 is designated as the Home note. The white notes either side of A5 are designated as positive or negative numbers.

3 Play the note B5 a few times, and you’ll see what happens: B5 adds one to the note value, C6 adds two, G5 subtracts one, F5 subtracts two, and so on. At any time, or if you get lost at this point, hit A5 again to return to that safe Home note. Be aware that A#5 is designated Rep, meaning it repeats the same note as before, whether that’s the home note or another.

4 Anyone with keen ears may have noticed that our A5 note wasn’t actually playing an A – it was playing a C all along! You can change this using the Root note selector on the very left of the second-highest row of buttons. Raise the note value to get a different scale going – D major, F major, even A# major… the world of major scales is your oyster!

5 You can change the scale using the Scale selector above. Let’s put it to Blues for some moody soloing. Start slowly to get the hang of things, and learn to get comfortable with this different way of playing. When you’ve got your mind around single notes, it’s time for some chords. Multiple notes will sound together, and the current note (ie, A#5) will be changed by the total of their positive and negative values.

6 Let’s look at some more controls. You can set your home note to be a different degree of the scale using the Home selector. It’s set to 1st by default, but you can change it to, say, 2nd, to use the C Dorian mode when set to a major scale. You can also change the Octave of the home note using the selector to the right of this.

7 We’ve already seen the Scale selector in the top row. To its right are three switches set to Off. The first two map MIDI notes of your choice to the left and right arrow selectors; the third lets you choose a whole octave to select the Scale used – ie, C for major, C# for minor, D for melodic minor, and so on. These three controls are seen on the Root, Home and Octave selectors, too.

8 Once you’ve got the middle strip of notes that do all the work, you can delve deeper into them. Select the current assignments to define which notes do what. You can select multiple Home notes, Repeat notes, and define the positive and negative values applied.

9 Here we’ve set up multiple definitions of Home and Repeat, as well as other options like Home: + Oct, Home: -Oct, and Home: Don’t Play, leaving only a few positive and negative numbers still in the mix. With a G minor pentatonic scale selected, all that’s left is to do is bang around on the keyboard and come up with something we never would have arrived at without Scale Player CM!