Exotic Scales

This post is a continuation of this one and this one. It's probably worth starting with those first. This time we find all the ways to expand Hungarian Major Pentatonic (1 3 #4 5 7) to a seven-note scale.

After experimenting with my new friends the Hungarian Pentatonics yesterday, I decided to look a bit more carefully at what they can do for us. Today I started with what I'm calling the Hungarian Minor Pentatonic: 1 b3 #4 5 b7.

Following up on the previous post, I spent a bit of time today with Harmonic Minor #4, aka Hungarian Minor, aka Simhendramadhyamam. Here's some stuff I found.

It's no secret that I like m7b5 arpeggios. The other day I was trying to figure out all the options I use on a m7 chord, and came across what's almost a pattern but isn't. Nothing life-changing but some directions for further investigation.

I stumbled across this while playing around with augmented triads on minor chords and thought it was at least a little bit interesting, if only because it led me to a scale I haven't come across in a musical context before.

I stumbled across this while playing around with augmented triads on minor chords and thought it was at least a little bit interesting, if only because it led me to a scale I haven't come across in a musical context before.

The Superaugmented Scale is a major scale with every note raised by a semitone except the 1 and 7: 1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 7. It came up a couple of times in the lines in my recent Scriabin-inspired post so I thought it might be worth digging deeper into.

I had more fun than anticipated with the results of raiding Scriabin for vocabulary, so I did it again with another piano piece I'm very fond of: Xenakis's "Mists".

Hit by a bout of insomnia last night I ended up listening to Scriabin's Piano Sonata No 7 and stealing bits from it to turn into jazz lines. Here are the slightly deranged results.

Say you've written (or a bandmate as written) a tune that features a sustained Maj7b5 chord. What do you play over it? Probably you don't have standard vocabulary for this type of chord, and since it's unusual it's not likely you'll find many ideas by transcribing. So how could you quickly build coherent vocabulary?