I, working alone on a hobby project, added MTS-ESP support to my plugin in 40 minutes, and it only took that long because I made a silly mistake and spent half an hour tracking it down.

I've been messing about with the JUCE framework for years but never really finished something enough to put it out into the world. Finally, I did, so go and grab it and see if you find it useful. That's all.

This post is a bit of a continuation of the previous one on "expanded Harmonic Minor". The idea is again to take a somewhat familiar idea of playing something a semitone above or below the root of a chord, and flip it to be below or above, as it were. These ideas came out of playing through the chords to "Blue in Green", which isn't to say they're particularly applicable to that tune but more that they came from a real musical context, not some abstract theoretical observation.

We can think of the Harmonic Minor scale as a minor triad with a diminished seventh chord a semitone below it. In fact, I'd guess this is how the scale originally came about, and you can hear this relationship frequently in the music of Bach's time. This post is about an expanded version of that idea.

Following up on this recent post that used the minor major 7 (mM7) chord, here's a quick description of what happens when you combine a pair of them. It turns out there are only three different ways to do this.

The Half-Whole (or Whole-Half) Diminished scale has eight notes. What happens if we delete one? It turns out there are only two ways to do this, but each produces a seven-note scale with a full complement of modes.

The Carnatic melakatas form a system of 72 seven-note scales. What happens if we play them upside down?

This little cluster of four notes can expand your vocabulary and open the door to exotic scales and chords, including both conventional jazz stuff and more far-out weirdness. I find this especially useful for finding things on piano (which I'm not very good at) but it applies to anything really.

Dharmavati and Neetimati have come up a couple of times in my practice so I thought it was time to look more closely at them. I'm especially interested in learning to hear the differences between them as both can be thought of as "Lydian minor" sounds that seem initially very similar. When I dug into it a bit more deeply, I found a third member of the same family, and then of course a bunch more.

I didn't tell anyone about them. Here's what I was up to and how you can hear them if you'd like to.