Exotic Scales


Some Fun with Contrary Motion

Forte's set number 6-z6 can be played as C-C#-D-F-F#-G, which doesn't look like much. I found it today while trying to capture a bit of Sorabji's style and got some nice vocabulary ideas from it on the theme of intervals moving in contrary motion.

Expanded Lydian and Locrian

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.

The Diminished Hypermode and "Expanded Harmonic Minor"

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.

Double Minor Major 7 Combos

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 Harmonic and Melodic Minor Scales

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.

Inversions of Melakatas

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

The Lydian Minor Family: Neetimati, Dharmavati and Simhendramadhyamam

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.

Some Double Harmonic Chords and "Boxes"

The Double Harmonic scale can be thought of as a major scale with flattened second and sixth notes. Whereas Harmonic Minor contains the distinctive sequence semitone-minor third-semitone, Harmonic Major is made from two copies of the same sequence. Hence, I presume, "double" harmonic.

Lydian #9 on the Coltrane Cycle

I've been reconnecting with guitar lately and for the last few days I've gravitated towards a particular variation on the Coltrane Cycle idea that I'm enjoying. It starts with a mode of Harmonic Minor and varies it by sliding around in major thirds. Nothing groundbreaking here but it's what's in my head at the moment.

Co-Melakatas: Pentatonic Shadows of Carnatic Scales

Regular readers will know that whenever I study almost any resource, I take an interest in whatever isn't in it. I guess this is a habit I picked up early, when somebody pointed out that not only are the white notes on a piano the major scale but the black notes -- all the ones that aren't in the major scale -- form a major pentatonic. Switching between a scale, chord or whatever and its complement is something I find very musically useful. So I was surprised to realise I've never studied melakatas this way. What do their complements look like?