I thought a brief word was in order to explain the apparent change of direction of this blog of late. This is that brief word. In short, as the heading suggests, a lot is staying the same but the perspective is changing.

This is a quick brain-dump of what I've learned over the past two weeks about the Volca FM.

Dexed is a free VST plugin that emulates (and acts as an interface for) the Yamaha DX7, the first commercial keyboard to use FM synthesis. The DX7 came out in 1983 and was a huge seller and was responsible for many of the iconic sounds of '80s electro-pop, but it was also an incredibly sophisticated synth engine.

In a previous post I made some observations about what I call the Augmented Hexatonic (1 b2 3 4 #5 6). Here I pull some harmony out of the resulting scales. You should probably read the earlier post before getting into this one.

I've recently acquired a basic synth setup with a view to exploring some non-standard tunings. This is something I've messed with in the past and used for "colour" but never really got deeply into, but that's about to change.

In my own practice I've been making less use of scale and arpeggio language lately and looking at more neutral, atonal terminology instead. There's a good chance this will show up in some upcoming posts so here's a primer.

Continuing my look at 3- and 4-note sets that aren't common in diatonic music, we arrive at 1-b2-3, the "Phyrgian major" or "Harmonic minor" triad. first here's the usual full-fingerboard diagrams: chords are formed by playing one note of each colour and dark blue is the root. The top one is 1-b2-3 and the bottom is 1-#5-7, its inversion; these are Forte number 3-3:

The Whole Tone Scale, 1 2 3 #4 #5 b7, has quite a few interesting subsets, including the well-known augmented triad and the dominant chords 7b5 and 7#5. Today we'll look at the "triad" 1-3-#4 and its inversion, 1-3-b7. These are known by the Forte number 3-10.

This is a follow-on from this post, when we discovered Forte 4-9 as the coscale of the octatonic you get from combining Vishwambari with Hatakambari (help with Forte numbers). Which makes it sound much more abstruse than it was in context (I think). But let's look at it as its own thing.

I've been exploring the Sus b2 and Sus #4 arpeggios a bit lately. They're inversions of each other and are an important sound in early 20th century classical music. Here are all the heptatonic scales I know of (there might be more) that can be completely covered by copies of one of these two structures.