Scaler 3 helps you write music. Chords, scales, basslines… the works. And it, erm… scales that assistance to your level.
Total beginners can write musical compositions from scratch, no theory knowledge required. More experienced producers can add more variety and complex performance expressions to their music. Even concert pianists can compose in new and exciting directions that they’d never normally think to play.
Plus, it’s the ultimate writer’s unblocker!
We know, we know… these days there are loads of composition tools on the market. But Scaler is a real OG. Since 2017, it’s been at the cutting edge, and most similar tools owe some – or all – of their approach to Scaler. Whether used as a plugin or standalone app, Scaler delivers the most comprehensive, powerful set of composition tools you can get in 2025. And his new version seriously expands its range of editing features.
This isn’t a full a deep dive into Scaler 3 – that would take a whole book. Instead, we’ll get a feel for it by composing some chords and a b-line to accompany an acapella, in ways that require absolutely no knowledge of music theory.
And by the way, we’re only using the piano chord layout – there’s a mode for guitarists too.
If you’re new to music theory but want to sound like you’ve trained for years, Scaler 3 has you covered
Getting A House Beat Started With Scaler 3
Pull the Chord
First we open the Scaler 3 VST in Ableton Live and select the D minor scale, to match our acapella. Instantly the D minor scale chords appear.
When you don’t know the scale, Scaler can analyse MIDI or audio to suggest options. And if starting a track from scratch you could select any scale you like. Scaler offers up descriptions to help. For example, D minor is SERIOUS, SAD, EMOTIONAL, SENTIMENTAL. So be sure to have some tissues ready.
Next we play our acapella and click on the chords of D minor to audition them using Scalers on board Felt Piano instrument. Three work perfectly so we drag them to the Progression section. Here we can sequence progressions, but for now it’s a useful place to collect chords that sound good with our audio. We can worry about sequencing later.
NOTE: By default, Scaler is offering us triads (three note chords) – but we could change that easily, for things like more notes per chord, and a whole host of other hugely impactful variations / chord types.
We want some more chords to play with, and the cool thing about musical scales is that there’s a lot of crossover – plenty of chords that aren’t in our scale will still work musically. And there’s a great tool for finding them, the Circle of Fifths. Scaler has a whole section for it.
Opening this window already offers us some additional chords it thinks will work (blue ones share the most notes from our scale scale, and are good bet, while lighter shades of grey indicate less shared notes but enough to be worth trying). We drag three more to our pool.
The Circle of Fifths
The Circle of Fifths is actually two concentric circles, with the basic minor scales inside, major outside. Anyone who’s used Mixed in Key will recognise the ‘Camelot Wheel’ (literally a re-labeled Circle of Fifths).
To use it, find your current scale on the wheel (D minor for us), then look to the scales either side of it (G minor, and A minor), and the corresponding scale on the other wheel (F Major). Those three scales share enough notes with your scale that most of what you play in them is likely to work. We click on each to display their chords and drag our favourites to the progression pool.
Ready made progressions
There’s one more cool tool to try before we arrange our chords – ready-made progressions for different styles, genres, and moods. There are even artist-made sets and Carl Cox delivers a particularly cool rave-style selection.
We dive into Genres>House to find some ready-made progressions and additional chords that work nicely with our acapella, then drag our picks to the pool below,. And now we can start building our progressions.
Now, we could build a progression by dragging the chords we’ve selected to reorder them. Or we could even use Scaler’s Arrange window to build up and entire backing track, across multiple channels, using either Scaler’s on board instruments or any of our third-party instruments.
For newcomers, though, it’s easier to start jamming chords live and recording the outputted MIDI in a DAW. Scaler’s Bind function assigns each of our selected chords to a single MIDI key so now we just play our acapella, start jamming with our selected chords to see what works.
We then hit record in our DAW, play our progressions, and instead of the single keys we pressed (or clicked), it records the full chords as MIDI, ready to edit. We also drag a few additional chords straight into Live, creating new MIDI clips.
To keep things beginner friendly, we’re tweaking our progressions in Live, but advanced users can do that easily in Scaler 3 too, and Scaler has powerful presets for the job. First we quantise what we played. Then we add humanising by offsetting the start and end points of each note a little, and vary their velocities, pushing individual notes harder, as this massively changes the character.
Voicings
Finally, we alter the ‘voicing’ of some chords (changing which octave each of the notes will play). A common example would be to move – or duplicate – the highest note of your chord (A3, for example) and move it down an octave or two so it’s the lowest note of the chord (A2, in this example). But really, you can move them all around, as long as they’re playing the same note on another octave.
Bridge chords – straight then humanised
Chord set 1 – straight then humanised
Chord set 2 – straight then humanised
Intro – straight then humanised
Transition – straight then humanised
Making a bassline
Creating a bassline couldn’t be easier. To keep it simple we open a new instance and select our D minor key. Now we simply drag our original three chords into the empty progression and open up the Motions window. This presents a huge library of patterns for arpeggios, melodies, basslines, and more. They’ll always lock to your current scale and play the pattern with the notes of the chosen chord.
We select a bass pattern and, with Bind enabled, can jam this too. Triggering each of our three chord selections plays the b-line with the notes of each, and we can record this as MIDI or just drag these selections into our DAW as MIDI, It’s that simple.
So that’s it – we’ve got chords that we never would’ve come up with by ourselves and we’ve got a bassline. And we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface.
Bass no vox
Bass with vox
Bridge Chords
Chord set 1 no vox
Chord set 1 with vox
Chord set 2 no vox
Chord set 2 with 4 vox loop variations
Intro no vox
Intro with vox
Transition
We could just as easily have chosen a key to match our mood, selected whole preconstructed progressions and elements, defined a style of performance, arranged patterns of progressions, melodies, basslines, and more, sequenced an entire song in Scaler using third-party instruments, then exported it all for mixing in our DAW.
When you don’t know the scale, Scaler can analyse MIDI or audio to suggest options. And if starting a track from scratch you could select any scale you like
Price and Competition
As we mentioned earlier, Scaler 3 isn’t the only composition tool on the market, but you won’t find a more powerful one. Of course, the more features, the more there is to learn, hence our streamlined hybrid approach above. And as future versions adds more features, it might be cool to see Scaler introduce two selectable interfaces – one for basic functions, another for advanced. This would keep all the complex features on hand when needed, but make the interface far more approachable and streamlined for basic functions.
Don’t worry, though, after the initial ‘Holy Mixolodian mode, Batman – that’s a lot of options!’ reaction, things are actually very straightforward. And our interface suggestion merely underlines the sheer power and potential that Scaler 3 brings to the party.
If you’re new to music theory but want to sound like you’ve trained for years, Scaler 3 has you covered. If you’re experienced but want to add some complexity and variations, it’ll do that too. And if you’re a Juilliard-trained, child prodigy, currently composing the score for the erotic Avatar spinoff, ‘This Time Blue Means Blue’… well, you probably aren’t reading this, and probably think you’re too special for Scaler 3 anyway. But you’d be wrong. And should probably stop accepting every job that comes in. It will haunt you later in your career.
Find out more about Scaler 3 – available now for $79.
