The "blues scale" is a common name for the hexatonic you get from adding a b5 to the minor pentatonic (1-b3-4-b5-5-b7). The idea is to play minor pentatonic with a "spicy note". Other spicy notes are the major 3 and (less often employed) the major 7 and b9. As a bit of fun, let's see what happens when we add two of these to minor pentatonic to produce a seven-note scale that, in theory, ought to have one foot in blues / rock language that everyone who has heard twentieth century pop music will be at least a bit familiar with.

The possible pairs, along with the resulting scales, are:

• 3 and b5: 1 b3 3 4 b5 5 b7 (mode of Tanarupi)
• b5 and 7: 1 b3 4 b5 5 b7 7 (mode of Kamavardani / Kanakangi)
• b2 and b5: 1 b2 b3 4 b5 5 b7 (mode of Ratnangi / Gamanashrama / Jhankaradhvani)
• 3 and 7: 1 b3 3 4 5 b7 7 (mode of Chalanata / Shubhapantuvarali)
• b2 and 7: 1 b2 b3 4 5 b7 7 (mode of Rupavati)
• b2 and 3: 1 b2 b3 3 4 5 b7 (mode of the scale I called "Midlocrian" in the book)

Nobody is more surprised than me that (a) they're all different, (b) five out of six are melakatas and (c) none of them is boring. Looks like we've got something to explore.

Since there are six scales, which is a lot of deal with, I want to keep it quite tight here. I'll show CAGED diagrams (from the book), pull out any triadic harmonies they contain and point out any modes that seem particularly significant.

I'll also mention the complement of each of these scales. The complement of the minor pentatonic is a major scale, and adding notes to the minor pentatonic just deleted them from its complement, so each of these scales has a complement that's a diatonic subset, i.e. it's a major scale with two notes missed out.

This is Part One of a two-part story, since we're not considering here the notes 2, b6 and 6. On their own these tend to produce less interesting results but in combination with the notes discussed here we can create a good amount of chaos. The four notes I'm going with in this post are either established "blue notes" (major third, flatted fifth) or leading notes to the tonic (7 and b2), and as such they're easy to think of as "passing tones" rather than "fragments of a scale". That "passing tone" heuristic is what I want to exploit here. Next time we'll get weirder.

Tanarupi (Adding 3 and b5)

Tanarupi itself is the mode you get by starting with minor pentatonic at the fifth. Here's a very direct statement of Tanarupi, perhaps also illustrating how a strong scale presented with real musicality can lead to striking results without needing a lot of fireworks:

We're going to need to invent names for the other modes since none of them have common ones. I guess today let's go with the "dozenal" names due to Justin Pecot, which are currently not well-documented online but you can find them on Ian Ring's very useful website.

Our mode, with minor pentatonic at the root, belongs to the family of minor up a minor third ideas -- C Tanarupi is Cm7 + Ebm6 with the 4 (F) added in, which is the 11 of Cm and the 9 of Ebm. The dozenal name is Hulian. It's a common blues-rock or jazz-blues sound -- here's some examples mixing this idea with the addition of the major 6, which we'll deal with next time:

The mode that takes the Ebm as the root chord instead is 1-b2-2-b2-2-bb6-bb7, which is quite a mess as it has an audacious four sequential semitone steps from the root note. The other notes in the scale look positively lonely by comparison. Its dozenal name is Sanian. As usual, "minor down a minor third" yields something major/minor rather than simply minor. We can think of C Sanian as Cm6/9 with Am7 on top, but the E in Am7 becomes the major third of Cm. Overall I think this one is a mess

The complement is Forte 5-24, an odd little collection of notes that would could think of as a Lulu with an extra note exactly in the middle, although that probably doesn't help any of us find it on the guitar. Luckily there's an easier way, because as I mentioned above this is a diatonic subset.

Suppose you're playing C Sanian (C-Eb-E-F-Gb-G-Bb), which has the minor pentatonic rooted at C. We'll go up a major sixth (to A) and think of the diatonic major scale (A-B-C#-D-E-F#-G#). By dropping the overlapping notes (E and F#/Gb) we arrive at the pentatonic scale A-B-C#-D-G#, which is the complement of Sanian. As a mnemonic, you might think of this as a kind of "backwards relative minor": usually we go from A minor to C major; here we're going from C minor to A major. Instead of a different scale with the same notes we get exactly the opposite notes (barring two overlaps).

Of course this is an awful lot of higher-order thinking to be doing when actually trying to play something. A heuristic like this is good to get you started playing the idea without having to look at a page all the time and can be abandoned once you discover musical ideas that interest you. Obviously that goes for all the

Kamavardani (Adding b5 and 7)

This one can mostly be thought of as a m7 chord with a Maj 7 chord a semitone below it. So we combine Am7 with G# Maj 7 -- that gives all the notes of this scale except the 4 so it's most of the sound. The dozenal system gives that scale the undignfied name Umpian; by contrast some other sources (probably all the same source copying each other) give it the very fancy title "Chromatic Hypophrygian". Admittedly I seem to have called it "Semidominant Suspended" in the book which is no better. I'd like to register my dislike for all these options but I guess I'll go with Umpian for consistency with the rest of this post and because it's short.

Kamavardani itself is what you get when your root chord is the major seventh instead. So C Kamavardani is C Maj 7 plus Db minor add 11 (or you can go for the full Db minor pentatonic). I swear I've written about this idea on this blog before but can't currently find it, so in a nutshell here it is.

Lots of jazz / fusion types know to play on a Maj 7 chord by playing the minor pentatonic a semitone below -- e.g. on C Maj 7, play B minor pentatonic. This outlines the most interesting notes form C Lydian and is a very inside (read: square and boring) sound. I like to do the opposite and shift the minor pentatonic up a semitone instead. This gives the upper structure b9-#11-b13 which is very spicy on a major seventh chord. Now I have a name for that: it's Kamavardani.

The other Carnatic melakata in this modal group is Kanakangi. Here the minor pentatonic is a whole tone above the root. This scale as no third so to Western ears it has a "suspended" quality and it seems to be a rather rare scale in Indian music, too. I don't know anything about it so it's something to maybe explore in future.

The complement of these scales is a Maj 7 Add 11 arpeggio with the root at the 6 of the minor pentatonic. So for A Umpian we'd play F# Maj 7 Add 11. This is a subset of the major scale at the same root -- F# major over A in this case -- and the overlapping notes are the 2 and 6.

Ratnangi (Adding b2 and b5)

The scale in question is probably best called Locrian bb6 -- I and others have in the past identified this as a "blues scale" but like the others in this post it's only sort-of bluesy. You can think of it as a Minor 7 chord with the Major 7 a tritone above it, making a loose connection with some other stuff I've been messing with lately. There are quite a few other modes in this group that are arguably more significant, though.

Three of those are melakatas -- to summarize:

• C Jhankaradhvani is made from the minor pentatonic at the 2 -- it's Aeolian bb7, so this is a "tonic minor sixth" kind of sound
• C Ratnangi is made from the minor pentatonic at the 5 -- it's Phrygian b3, so this has the suspended (no third) quality and the very distinctive b9/b7 pair around the root.
• C Gamanashrama is made from the minor pentatonic at the tritone -- it's Lydian b9, so this belongs to the world of "altered Lydian" that seems on paper like it should be jazzy but is actually something else.

I also want to mention the scale I call Superaugmented, which is made from the minor pentatonic at the 4 and is very altered in relation to the major scale modes. It's come up a few times on this blog and has its own posts here and here.

The complement is a dominant 7 add 11 arpeggio rooted at the major third of the pentatonic. This is Mixolydian with its 2 and 6 deleted. In real life, though, it might be easier to find the major scale built on the major sixth of the original pentatonic, deleting the 3 and 6 from it to get the proper complement.

Chalanata (Adding 3 and 7)

This one actually is Chalanata and most of the other scales in this group are a mystery to me. In terms of fretboard geometry it's easily confused with Kamavardani. Most simply it's just a Maj 7 arpeggio and the minor pentatonic scale at the same root, superimposed. If we think of Lydian as "Minor Pentatonic down a fret" and Kamavardani as "Minor Pentatonic up a fret", Chalanata is the one in the middle, the naive blues guitarist's approach to a Major 7 chord that supposedly doesn't work. It turns out people have made it work, and found music in it, proving once again that proscriptions don't have much of a place in music.

Here's Maynard Ferguson and his glorious big band doing some Indo-fusion that's allegedly in Chalanata -- perhaps the most 1970 thing I've ever posted on this blog:

There's one more melakata in this modal group -- Shubhapantuvarali, which you get from building the minor pentatonic on the b6. So to play C Shubhapantuvarali, play Ab Minor pentatonic with the 3 and 7 added. Here's a short instructional video about hearing the difference between Shubhapantuvarali and Kamavardani from the perspective of the Carnatic tradition:

The complement is a subset of the major scale at the 6 of the pentatonic-- so for C Chalanata we play F# major. The overlapping notes are the 2 and 5 of that scale. Removing these produces a mode of the pentatonic known as Kumoi:

Rupavati (Adding b2 and 7)

Again this one is Rupavati, but this time there are no other modes in the group that have any significance that I'm aware of. Rupavati is very much a minor scale, and feels to me a bit like Phrygian with an added major 7th, so with a touch of Harmonic/Melodic Minor. The absence of any kind of sixth takes us away from diatonic sounds, though.

It's easy to find because you just surround the root of Minor Pentatonic with a chromatic enclosure, although I don't think that's always a great way to actually play it -- as with all these scales, it really only comes alive when you grow beyond the "Minor Pentatonic plus two" mentality and treat it as an organic whole. Still, it might be a starting-point if you want to incorporate this into your existing language.

Here's an instructional video showing examples of chromatic enclosures around the root in a jazz-fusion context:

and here's a bit of a Jonathan Kreisberg live show -- I'm not suggesting Kreisberg uses this scale as such but I've heard him talk about using chromatic enclosures in a similar way to create the kind of Coltraney lines he's associated with:

For fun I'll mention the mode I call "Ultra Locrian" in the book. You see, Super Locrian (a mode of Melodic Minor) is the scale you get when you flatten every note of the major scale except the root (C Db Eb Fb Gb Ab Bb). Then "Ultra Locrian" arises from double-flatting every note except the tonic, and the 2 because that would become equal to the tonic (i.e. C Db Ebb Fbb Gbb Abb Bbb). As far as I know this cute observation has no musical importance but I thought I'd mention it. Ultra Locrian is built on the Minor Pentatonic a whole tone above the root, which usually gives an easy-going Dorian feel, but the added notes give it a very dramatic descending chromatic section that resolves down to the root that's likely to shove you firmly out of your comfort zone.

It may also be worth mentioning that what I'll now call the "Kamavardani trick" -- shifting Minor Pentatonic up a semitone on a Maj 7 chord -- works interestingly with Rupavati. In fact you can shift it up or down a semitone and still have the root of the Maj 7 in the scale, although not all the other notes. I don't know anything about the resulting scales but if you like this kind of sound these are worth exploring -- you can think of them as a matching pair a whole tone apart.

The complement is a subset of the major scale built on the 6, so the complement of C Rupavati comes from A major. The overlapping notes are the 2 and 3, so the scale is 1-4-5-6-7 (A-D-E-F#-G#), which we could think of as a major triad (D-F#-A) with added 9 and #11 (E and G#, respectively).

Midlocrian (Adding b2 and 3)

Names-wise, "Midlocrian" is another of my fanciful Locrian derivatives -- this is a major scale with all of its middle notes flattened: 1 2 b3 b4 b5 6 7. However, the scale we get starting from the minor pentatonic in root position isn't that, it's the one above.

I'd be inclined to think of the added notes as belonging to the diminished seventh arpeggio at the b2, 3, 5 or b7; that's an easy thing to think of playing because we often play Minor Pentatonic over a dominant chord for which that diminished is a sub, at least when it's functioning. Here's a nice, clear instructional video on using this sound in the blues-rock idiom:

I don't know what to make of the modes of this one. In Part Two we'll look at more possibilities and most of them will be like this -- weird and hard to "justify" with a reference to some known musical application. Scales like that need a different approach: either you ignore them, which is perfectly valid, or you create a path to them from what you already know.