I’m a bit old-fashioned. I wrote a “scale” generator way back when so I could play a MIDI file of a Major/minor scale sequence.

These days I use “MIDIplayer X” to play my scales. The classic ‘t2mf’ is used to create the MIDI file from a shell script…

#!/bin/bash


# SCALE="C" SCALEM="a" N1=60



let N1=N1+0


let N2=N1+2


let N3=N1+4


let N4=N1+5


let N5=N1+7


let N6=N1+9


let N7=N1+11


let N8=N1+12



let NM1=N1-3


let NM2=N1-1



cat >$SCALE-$SCALEM.txt <<EOF


MFile 0 1 24


MTrk


0 Meta Text "$SCALE major scale"


0 On ch=1 n=$N1 v=64


12 On ch=1 n=$N1 v=0


24 On ch=1 n=$N2 v=64


36 On ch=1 n=$N2 v=0


48 On ch=1 n=$N3 v=64


60 On ch=1 n=$N3 v=0


72 On ch=1 n=$N4 v=64


84 On ch=1 n=$N4 v=0


96 On ch=1 n=$N5 v=64


108 On ch=1 n=$N5 v=0


120 On ch=1 n=$N6 v=64


132 On ch=1 n=$N6 v=0


144 On ch=1 n=$N7 v=64


156 On ch=1 n=$N7 v=0


168 On ch=1 n=$N8 v=64


180 On ch=1 n=$N8 v=0


190 Meta Text "$SCALEM minor scale"


200 On ch=1 n=$NM1 v=64


212 On ch=1 n=$NM1 v=0


224 On ch=1 n=$NM2 v=64


236 On ch=1 n=$NM2 v=0


248 On ch=1 n=$N1 v=64


260 On ch=1 n=$N1 v=0


272 On ch=1 n=$N2 v=64


284 On ch=1 n=$N2 v=0


296 On ch=1 n=$N3 v=64


308 On ch=1 n=$N3 v=0


320 On ch=1 n=$N4 v=64


332 On ch=1 n=$N4 v=0


344 On ch=1 n=$N5 v=64


356 On ch=1 n=$N5 v=0


368 On ch=1 n=$N6 v=64


380 On ch=1 n=$N6 v=0


392 Meta TrkEnd


TrkEnd


EOF



t2mf $SCALE-$SCALEM.txt >$SCALE-$SCALEM.mid

I assure you that weird characters in file names can be odd.