Exotic Scales

The Double Harmonic scale can be thought of as a major scale with flattened second and sixth notes. Whereas Harmonic Minor contains the distinctive sequence semitone-minor third-semitone, Harmonic Major is made from two copies of the same sequence. Hence, I presume, "double" harmonic.

I've been reconnecting with guitar lately and for the last few days I've gravitated towards a particular variation on the Coltrane Cycle idea that I'm enjoying. It starts with a mode of Harmonic Minor and varies it by sliding around in major thirds. Nothing groundbreaking here but it's what's in my head at the moment.

Regular readers will know that whenever I study almost any resource, I take an interest in whatever isn't in it. I guess this is a habit I picked up early, when somebody pointed out that not only are the white notes on a piano the major scale but the black notes -- all the ones that aren't in the major scale -- form a major pentatonic. Switching between a scale, chord or whatever and its complement is something I find very musically useful. So I was surprised to realise I've never studied melakatas this way. What do their complements look like?

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.

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.

Back when I was putting together the scales book (a good 10 years ago now) I had trouble finding names for all the exotic scales I wanted to put in. When I couldn't find one I just had to make something up. Sometimes I think I made a good choice -- Superaugmented and Ultra Locrian, for example, do what they say on the tin -- and sometimes not. But for one set of scales I was completely stumped.

In my last post the Melodic Minor b5 scale cropped up unexpectedly; I wasn't expecting this so I dug into it a little bit. On paper I found quite a few interesting properties, but when I sat down with the guitar it became obvious that this was something very familiar. And then a little more experimentation revealed something more interesting.

Neetimati and Gayakapriya are Carnatic scales that have come up a few times on this blog, but that I've never really dug into. In my last post I discovered they share a slightly obscure property; on closer inspection it turns out they have a close and musically useful bond.