Thirteen ways of looking at the Augmented Coscale

For years I've been playing major seventh chords in a cycle of major thirds as a kind of "atonal major tonality". I talked about that here and in other places on this blog. But lately I've been trying major sixths as well, and they produce something similar but different. In fact it's the negative image of something very familiar.



Of Moonlight and Bridges

This post began with this work by Alan Theisen, where he figures out all the ways to combine four triads (major, minor, diminished or augmented) to exactly cover all twelve notes.

It ended up somewhere very different, but let's start there.

Minor 6 Suvarnangi secrets

I recently went through an exercise of writing a lot of tunes using Suvarnangi or, more accurately, a mode of Suvarnangi. This scale seems very lumpy and dissonant when you just run it up and down so here I'll break down how I think of it and some of the secrets it contains. Because as with any seven-note scale, what seems like nothing much turns out to contain a whole universe when we stick it under the microscope.



How I wrote 100 tunes in a month and why you should too

It was 96 because 100 isn't divisible by 12 and I don't know whether you actually should or not but I do have things to say about what was good about it for me.

New Album -The Archidoxes

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.

The all-but-six chords

The all-but-six (ABS) chords are Forte 6-1, 6-8, 6-14 and 6-32. They're all six-note chords that contain every interval except the tritone. Of these, I think 6-8 and 6-14 are particularly promising.

VST plugin developers have no excuse for not supporting microtuning

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.

Announcing Galois, a free VST I made

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.

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.