ScaleMaster Pro v1.0.1 iPhone iPad iPod Touch

2016 | iPhone iPad iPod Touch | 26.1 MB
Scales are elementary to all musicianship. They provide flavor and harmonic structure, but are at the same time fairly complex. ScaleMaster is designed to help in several key areas concerning scales. It lists over 200 scale types in all keys and shows them in music notation. There are four different clefs available (treble, bass, alto and tenor). Additionally scale degrees are shown qualified by the interval to the root. To help visualization there are five virtual instruments (banjo, bass, guitar, mandolin and piano). These virtual instruments feature overlays that can show scale degrees or position of a note in the current scale and can be shifted to all available positions. All stringed instruments (banjo, bass, guitar and mandolin) fully support left-handed display, support many standard and open tunings as well as varying string sets (4, 5, 6 string bass and 4 or 5 string mandolin).
Virtual Instruments

ScaleMaster offers 5 virtuell instruments: banjo, bass, guitar, piano and mandolin. All instruments feature their own sound and are playable with the computer's mouse. They can also be shifted into different positions. Stringed instruments like guitar are shiftable from first to 12th position and the piano instrument has a range of over 6 octaves. Custom tuning for stringed instruments as well as support for left-handed display are available via ScaleMaster's preferences.
Chord Matching

The chord/scale realtionship is of particular importance to improvising musicians. ScaleMaster allows to filter down the existing vocabulary of 211 scales with 41 of the most common chord structures. The resulting group of scales then fully consists of only scales including all chord tones. This is reflected in the notation view which highlights chord tones in red and displays a chord symbol below the scale title. This feature allows to open up and enrich the improviser's palette and give him or her an alternative to the go-to choice.
Tuning Presets

All stringed instruments (banjo, bass, guitar and mandolin) have a tunings window. All common standard and open tunings for the specific instrument are available from the tunings picker at the top of the window. Using any of the slider will override the current tuning and generate a custom tuning. Strings can be tuned by 7 semitones higher or lower than the standard tuning. The tuning picker also selects alternate sets of strings for a given instrument. The bass instrument for example supports 4, 5 and 6 string variants and the banjo instrument is availabe in 4 and 5 string versions.
Watch-enabled for iOS

Like all watch apps ScaleMaster for Apple Watch is an extension of the iOS app that hosts it. If you own ScaleMaster and an Apple Watch you get the watch app for free. ScaleMaster for Apple Watch is at this point a very basic extension and does exactly one thing. It let's you select from over 200 different scales, pick a root and then spells the scale correctly with flats, sharps triple sharps and so on. Very basic, but so was the first ScaleMaster app when it was released 8 years ago. We will be adding more and more features now that we got the initial version off the ground.
Concluding

Designed for the beginning musician as well as the professional, ScaleMaster is an excellent tool towards advancement in theory and scales in particular, making it easy to look up a scale in seconds, getting a taste of the flavor of a particular scale by listening to it, or finding out how to play it on one's instrument.
Features

211 scale types
Virtual banjo, bass, guitar, mandolin and piano instruments
Alto, bass, tenor and treble clefs
Adjustable positions for all instruments
Adjustable tuning for all string instruments
Semitone indicators
Scale rating
Scale type indicator (i.e. pentatonic)
Support for left-handed players
Chord/scale matching
Displays note names, scale index or degree
Adjustable playback directions
High quality banjo, bass, guitar, mandolin and piano samples
History View
Global transposition for horn players
Presets for all common banjo, bass, guitar, mandolin tunings
Support for 4 and 5 string banjo
Support for 4, 5 and 6 string bass
ScaleMaster is localized into Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish