Unless you happen to have both perfect pitch and a pure, accurate singing voice, the chances are that singing on a chromatic scale will result in some unwanted MIDI notes. One way to reduce the amount of MIDI clean up in your DAW is to restrict the output notes to the specific range of notes you want to control.
Fortunately Dubler has a variety of ways to do this!
Turning notes off/on using the piano roll
One way to restrict the output notes is to simply turn them off on the piano roll – you can do this by clicking on the note you want ignored. Excluded notes are shown in grey. To turn a note back on you can click it again. The restriction is applied across all octaves.
Vocal note selection
Dubler also allows you to set the note restriction through singing.
Start the note collector by clicking on the keylock icon.
Initially all notes will be turned off. While the note collector is running you can turn notes back on by singing them for a consistent period.
Once you have activated all the notes you want to use, click on the keylock icon again to turn off the note collector and apply that note restriction. You can return to chromatic at any time by double clicking the keylock icon.
Key Fixing
Both of the above methods will result in a ‘custom’ key fix, however one of the great things about Dubler is you can also apply a note restriction based on a musical key.
You can do this by accessing the Key settings menu by clicking on the right-hand side of Dubler and navigating to ‘Key’ in the setting panel. Alternatively the Key settings panel will open automatically when you click on the piano keyroll or when you use vocal note selection.
In this panel you can either set a key manually by choosing the root note and scale you want. Or by using Dubler’s key suggestion (see below).
Currently the keys available are limited to Major, Minor, Major Pentatonic and Minor Pentatonic scales. In the future we will add more.
Scale Suggestion
When you have a custom key restriction applied (either through clicking on the piano roll or through vocal selection) Dubler will, if possible, suggest a scale.
When a key suggestion is available it will be shown in the Key settings panel. To apply it simply click on the “Suggested Scale”.
Note that if the custom scale does not fit within one of the available scales then no scale suggestion will be made.
Chords
When a key fix is applied, or when there is a suggested scale, Dubler can be used to generate chords. Currently this feature is limited to a simple triad but in the future this feature will be expanded to include more complex chord shapes and inversions.
To activate chords make sure a key fix is applied, or a suggested scale is available, and click the ‘Chords’ toggle button.
Quick Tip: You don’t have to apply a suggested scale in order to generate chords. If you have a custom key fix that generates a suggested scale then Dubler can still generate chords based on the suggested scale without having to actually apply it.
Above you can see a 3 note custom scale where chords are active based on the underlying suggested scale of C Major Pentatonic.
Note that if no key restriction is applied, or if a custom key restriction is applied that does not have a corresponding suggested scale, then the chords function will not be available.
