I had a look at the linked page. Cubase it does have a playable qwerty keyboard. Studio Setup>On-Screen Keyboard. The linked page doesn’t say that it maps the notes to the white keys only, though. And for certain modes, it’s not even possible. A diminished scale, for example,has eight notes.
You can limit the notes to a given mode when playing from the qwerty keyboard or a midi keyboard. If you haven’t tried it, please do:
- On a MIDI or instrument track add the MIDI Insert, ‘MIDI Modifiers’, then select a scale, and play the white keys. It works well for several of the scales. For the others though, you have to play some black keys too, such as for the #4 in lydian, and the #5 in the whole tone scale. There’s also the problem of keys with duplicate notes, like in pentatonic scales since they only have five notes. Does FL Studio mute those keys, or how is it dealt with there?
Anyhoo, The feature we are talking about here, in order to be complete, and even worth doing, is this, in my view:
- Compile an encyclopedia of modes and scales from around the world, and make them available via a drop-down menu that also provides away to transpose, such that the musician can play C on the keyboard, and have it transposed to whatever pitch (s)he wants as the tonic.
- Then, provide an automatic method to make the microtonal pitch adjustments needed for accurate playback of modes used in music from Asia, Africa, Japan, Indonesia- well, almost any folk music of indigenous people anywhere in the world, and most notably, Maqam music. Certainly there are many more such modes than there are diatonic modes in the world.
