Exotic Scales

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.

The "blues scale" is a common name for the hexatonic you get from adding a b5 to the minor pentatonic (1-b3-4-b5-5-b7). The idea is to play minor pentatonic with a "spicy note". Other spicy notes are the major 3 and (less often employed) the major 7 and b9. As a bit of fun, let's see what happens when we add two of these to minor pentatonic to produce a seven-note scale that, in theory, ought to have one foot in blues / rock language that everyone who has heard twentieth century pop music will be at least a bit familiar with.

Continuing from my previous post, this is an exploration of the tritone sub hexatonic (e.g., C-Db-E-F#-G-Bb) and its complement (e.g. D-Eb-F-G#-A-B). They're the same pitch class set (6-30) but feel and sound very different on the instrument.

Today I spent some time analysing and messing about with Ganamurti, one of the Carnatic melakata scales. This actually happened by accident -- I intended to look at something else, which I'll come back to, but wrote it down wrong on my way to the studio and didn't check until much later. I thought the results were quite nice so I'm counting this as a happy accident.

As a bit of a supplement to my previous post, here's a set of clockface diagrams for all the six- and seven-note scales in 12EDO that are equal to their own inversions. As I observed there, these might be interesting resources because every descending melody such a scale contains also exists as an identical descending version. I'll say more about that after the first pic.

I had a thought today that ended up in a bit of a rabbit hole. This is one of those posts that's probably just pseudo-academic hocus-pocus but there are lots of weird chords and scales in it and maybe there's even something to the "theory" stuff too.

I recently revisited this post in search of some new harmonic ideas and thought I'd take a closer look at Yagapriya, a rather exotic scale for us Westerners that's very far removed from the diatonic scales we're used to. It also doesn't harmonize easily using my usual tricks so I wanted to treat it more as a unique thing in itself and see where it led me. (As usual I'm using "Yagapriya" as the name for a 12EDO scale; I won't have anything to say about Carnatic music in this post.)

Just some quick materials I've been playing around this over the last few weeks -- one very nice resource that's existed for a while but is newly online and some stuff I invented. Enjoy!

The major scale is constructed as a stack of perfect fifths, so it contains the maximum number of them of any seven-note scale: six, in fact, because of that pesky diminished fifth between the 5 and 7 of the scale. I wondered which other scales (in 12EDO) contain lots of fifths.

In this final installment we look at some chords and harmonic ideas from the Moonlight and Bridge chords, focusing on the most exotic sounds we found last time.