Last time we looked at what we can make from the minor pentatonic scale plus two of the notes b2, 3, b5 and 7. This time we look at the remaining possible notes 2, b6 and 6. The previous batch of scales were rather well-behaved but these are a bit more of a mixture. We'll look through them all, recap everything and see if we can find a higher-level perspective on it all.

What's possible in summary

Here are all the scales we'll need to consider today, along with some we won't because they're already very familiar. In each case the two notes are being added to the minor pentatonic scale.

• 2 and b2: Something weird
• 2 and 3: Lipsean
• 2 and b5: Vanaspati / Mararanjani
• 2 and b6: Aeolian (boring)
• 2 and 6: Dorian (boring)
• b6 and b2: Phrygian (boring)
• b6 and 3: Varunapriya / Ragavardhini
• b6 and b5: Something weird
• b6 and 6: Lipsean (again)
• b6 and 7: Something weird
• 6 and 6: Dorian b2 (Melodic Minor mode -- boring)
• 6 and 3: Vagadheeswari / Bhavapriya / Naganandini
• 6 and b5: Something weird
• 6 and 7: Something weird

This collection is a bit more unruly than the previous one so if all this is confusing it would be best to start with Part one. We'll ignore the "boring" ones but note that this is how I originally learned the modes (as pentatonics with added notes) and it's not a completely horrible way to do that. We have one scale -- the one I call "Lipsean" -- that has the distinction of being the only heptatonic that's a Minor Pentatonic with two added notes in two different ways.

Besides that we have three melakata modal groups and a bunch of weird stuff. You never know with weird stuff: it might be a complete waste of time or open up a new world of new ideas, probably depending more on where you (or in this case, I) am at than on the scales themselves.

I'll deal with each of these categories in turn. As with the previous post I'll use dozenal names for scales I don't know a better name for and I'll continue to complain impotently about how unlovely they are.

As a general word of warning, these scales will quickly sound pretty same-y and if you play around with them your ears will probably get very tired. I don't think the game here is to learn all of these as distinct things and work really hard to hear all the differences between them. I would recommend one of two alternative approaches.

One is to just pick a scale you're attracted to, for whatever reason, forget about all the rest and study that. I'll probably do that with Kamavardani from the previous post as it's something I sort-of play already that I'd like to expand and be more analytical about. In particular there might be some nice harmonic things I can do with it that wouldn't come naturally to me otherwise.

The other way is to treat all of these as a foggy cloud. Imagine they are a vague image, seen through a glass darkly, of a comprehensive book of etudes on ways to add chromaticism to your Minor Pentatonic lines. You can dip into that book whenever you want a fresh idea. Of course, the book doesn't actually exist so whichever etude you want to play you'll have to come up with on your own. Well I can't do all the work for you, can I?

Lipsean

Two modes of Lipsean (as I call it) can be made by starting with the Minor Pentatonic in one position. The first adds the b6 and 6, completely "filling in" the gap between the 5 and b7. The other one (the third mode, as I reckon it) adds the 2 and 3 instead:

I noted in my Eight Winds post that if you play Lipsean and its transposition at the tritone, you cover all 12 notes; not very many heptatonics have that property. I described some other scales that do this and explained why we might care about it here. I think of these scales, and probably most of the scales in this post, primarily as atonal resources and that makes properties like this a bit more important.

Vanaspati / Mararanjani

This is another one we can make in two different ways. In this case there are two melakatas smong the modes but neither has the Minor Pentatonic in the root position so let's start with those:

I think Mararanjani (1-2-3-4-5-b6-bb7) is best thought of as a Major Pentatonic with added 4 and b6. It's one of the sub-family of these scales that's essentially a major scale mode but with one thing flipped -- in this case literally the major scale but with a b13 instead of the major 7. I don't know if I can think about it that way but it's worth noting because it has a very diatonic-ish sound, at least until you start harmonizing it I guess.

Vanaspati (1-b2-bb3-4-5-6-b7) is much more far out. It's the Minor Pentatonic built on the fifth, which is a nice inside kind of sound that's ambiguous as to whether the chord is minor 7 or dominant. The added notes are the b9 and 13, which maybe imply a Dorian b9 vibe but it's different because the natural 9 is also there and the third is missing, making it much less amenable to Western tonal harmony. So here's a video showcasing a well-known Indian composition in Vanaspati, with a brief spoken introduction to the composer at the beginning:

Varunapriya / Ragavardhini

This is another example where you can make these scales from a minor petatonic plus two notes in two different ways. This case is slightly easier to deal with than the last because the two modes you get from minor pentatonic in the root position are the ones we know from the melakata system.

Of all the scales in this post, these seem to me to be some of the more amenable ones when it comes to traditional melodic treatment. Varunapriya is a subset of Melodic Minor and Ragavardhini has a bluesy harmonic Major sound thanks to the 3 and b6. There's enough points of familiarity here for a Western musician to latch onto. Both C Varunapriya and C Ragavardhini have complements that are subsets of A Phrygian. This may be a nice approach for those of us who like 12-tone language with one foot in tonal history.

Even if you're not a fan of Carnatic music, this presentation of Varunapriya by Sandeep Narayan is worth a look:

See if you can cop some of the phrases and translate them into your own style.

Vagadheeswari / Bhavapriya / Naganandini

Vagadheeswari is a Minor Pentatonic with added major third and sixth:

From a Western perspective, it's as if it's unsure whether to be Dorian (with the b3 and 6) or Mixolydian (with the 3 and b7). Among its modes are a couple more melakatas:

Bhavapriya is Phrygian with a #4; Naganandini has a Mixolydian vibe but instead of 6-b7 we have #6-7, i.e. the last two notes are pushed up a semitone. That's one way to think of these guys anyway.

Another is to think of the "core" of Bhavapriya as a minor triad and a major triad separated by a tritone, which I've previously referred to as the Moonlight chord -- in Bhavapriya the minor triad is in the root position. There's a series of posts about this chord and its complement on this blog and I'd be inclined to start with Bhavapriya as an extended version of that language.

Naganandini on the other hand is two major triads separated by a whole tone; in the case of Naganandini the lower one is the root position. This is a subset of Mixolydian but the added 7 that turns it into Naganandini obfuscates that a bit -- it's similar to the Bridge chord discussed in the same post but it's not the same. Its complement is a pair of minor triads separated by a whole tone (which is the same pitch class set, 6-33, just inverted).

To play C Naganandini, play C major and D major triads. To play its complement, play the minor triad pair a tritone. It's funny how these tritone-related complements keep coming up in this discussion but I don't think it's surprising because the complement of Minor Pentatonic includes itself transposed by a tritone, too.

Manavati / Kantamani / Enigmatic

One of these is not like the others. Minor Pentatonic in the root position with added 6 and 7 gives this scale, whose dozenal name is Yacian -- it's nothing more complicated than Minor Pentatonic with three leading-tones going up to the root:

Two of its modes are Carnatic melakatas:

The odd one out is the Enigmatic Scale, which has a story behind it involving two of the most celebrated opera composers in history.

Here's Verdi's famous composition in Enigmatic:

and because I suspect a few of us here are guitar nerds of a certain age, here's Joe Satriani's:

The Remaining Possibilities

None of the remaining scales (or any of their modes) has any name or real-world application that I know of. However, I don't see anything to set these apart from the others -- they just haven't found applications yet. This post is already much too long so we'll have to save these for future adventures but for the record, here they are:

• Hirian (add b2 and 2, i.e. leading tones down to the root)
• Jitian (add b5 and #5, i.e. a chromatic enclosure around the 5)
• Vuzian (add b6 and 7)
• Kuvian (add b5 and 6)

I do want to end, though, with some thoughts about what to do with all this. As I suggested above, one approach is to use this to be more organised and focused about the general idea of adding extra notes to Minor Pentatonic. Instead of doing it haphazardly, pick one of these and go deep into it, which should open up paths beyond just "normal Minor Pentatonic stuff plus passing tones". For example, you can extract harmonic material out of any of these scales. This is a practical thing to do if you just want something new to knock around and pull some ideas out of.

But we can gain a more holistic point of view by considering the pentatonic complements of these scales. Each of those is a subset of the Major Scale a minor third below (or "built on the major sixth" if that's easier for you to find). This can lead to interesting compositional ideas because those two keys are not related in any way that's familiar from tonal harmony. For example, take C Lipsean I; its complement is a subset of A Major. In a sense, the idea of C Lipsean I is "play C Minor Pentatonic but borrow two notes from A Major".

You could think of this as kind of a distorted, looking-glass-world version of relative minor. Instead of C major being related to A minor -- which we're very familiar with -- here we have C minor related to A major, an entirely different kettle of fish. In its simplest form this would be exactly the relationship between the white notes of the piano (C Major) and the black notes (Eb Minor Pentatonic).

From that perspective what we're studied in these posts is all the ways to combine Eb Minor Pentatonic with a pentatonic subset of C Major plus two more notes. We've chosen to focus on the interesting cases where those two extra notes don't both come from C Major. This is an "all twelve notes" conception but it doesn't mean you have to play all twelve notes all the time -- it's a method to partition the twelve notes using familiar structures that produces much less familiar results.