This Ableton tutorial walks through how enabling Use Current Scale transforms the behavior of three different Live 12 devices: the Chord MIDI effect, the Arpeggiator, and the Meld synthesizer. The host demonstrates each one first without scale awareness, where semitone-based controls produce notes that sound off or out of key, then shows how flipping the switch reframes those controls in scale degrees, locking movement to the active scale.
With the Chord effect, shifting by two or four semitones sounds arbitrary, but shifting by two or four scale degrees adds notes that fit musically. The Arpeggiator's distance parameter works the same way, and once scale awareness is on, changing the clip's scale updates the arpeggiator's behavior in real time.
Meld's detune parameter gets the same treatment. Without scale awareness it drifts out of key; with it on, the detuning resolves to in-scale pitches and the result sits properly in the arrangement.
The throughline across all three is the same idea: Live 12 lets you work with relative musical movement rather than fixed semitone offsets, so your MIDI effects stay in key automatically as you explore different scales.