Set a scale in the Control Bar and Live tells everything else about it. The MIDI editor highlights the notes in key, scale-aware devices follow, and you stop writing wrong notes by accident.
Scale awareness
- Set the root and scale in the Control Bar.
- In a MIDI clip, turn on Fold and then Scale. The piano roll now shows only the notes in key — every note you draw is right.
- Turn on Scale on a clip to have it follow the global setting, or set a different scale per clip when a section changes key.
The devices that understand scales — Meld, the MIDI effects, several oscillator types — follow the same setting, so a detune becomes a harmony rather than a clash. That is the feature doing real work rather than just colouring the piano roll.
Extracting the key you already wrote in
Not sure what key something is in? Select the clip, right-click, and Live will tell you and offer to set it. Useful on samples, essential on anything you inherited.
Tuning systems
Equal temperament — twelve equal steps to the octave — is a compromise. It is a good one, and it is why a piano can play in any key, but it means no interval except the octave is actually in tune.
Live loads tuning files (.ascl and .scl) so you can work in something else:
- Just intonation — intervals as whole-number frequency ratios. Chords lock together in a way equal temperament cannot manage. Only works properly in one key.
- Historical temperaments — Werckmeister, Kirnberger and the rest. What Bach's keyboard music was written for.
- Non-Western systems — maqam, gamelan, and anything else with a different number of steps to the octave.
- Your own — a scale file is a text file. You can invent one.
Drop a tuning file into the browser's Tunings folder and apply it from the Control Bar. Every instrument in the set retunes.
Do this now
Write a simple triad pad and hold it. Switch from equal temperament to a just intonation tuning and listen to the chord stop beating. It is a small, immediately audible difference, and once you have heard it you will notice it on records.