User Manual

10 Smart Play – Playing and Editing Scales and Chords
KOMPLETE KONTROL’s Scale engine comes equipped with a vast amount of scales that you
can select and use to play your Instruments. This opens up possibilities to play an Instrument
such as a piano according to, e.g., the minor pentatonic scale without hitting a “false” note. In
Chord mode you can use the provided scales to combine individual note harmonies into
chords. Combined with the Arpeggiator, you can even play scales automatically simply by
pressing down a key on the KOMPLETE KONTROL keyboard or receiving an incoming MIDI
note.
When you select a scale in the Perform panel and switch the Scale engine on, the scale gets
mapped onto the keyboard. This means that regardless of what keys you actually press down
on the keyboard—or what MIDI notes you send from the host—the notes that are being played
back are always mapped onto the closest notes contained in the scale that you selected.
10.1 A Note about Music Theory
KOMPLETE KONTROL has built-in scales and harmonies that you can select to play your In-
struments with chords and arpeggiator sequences. To learn more about what that really means,
continue reading below.
Scales
Traditionally music is built by combining elements of rhythm and harmony. There are many ex-
ceptions to this, but to understand the concepts of scales, chords and arpeggiator sequences
let’s start from there.
All notes and keys correspond to a pitch—or tone frequency. On a keyboard, each key typically
represents a semitone, meaning that it is a “half step” higher or lower in pitch than the next
key (though other tunings exist as well). To play melodies or chords that sound good together,
notes are usually grouped together in scales. In the Western music tradition, a scale typically
covers seven white keys and five black keys on a keyboard or piano: an octave. It is called so
because the eighth key that follows the seventh contiguous white key plays the same note as
the first of the seven. That key is called the root note. A scale then, is a certain combination of
Smart Play – Playing and Editing Scales and Chords
A Note about Music Theory
KOMPLETE KONTROL A-Series - Manual - 105