Exotic Scales

Messiaen's Mode 6 is a symmetrical scale that can be made by adding two notes to the Whole Tone scale. Adding one of these gives us Neapolitan, so I thought it was probably time to look at the other one.

There are only three octatonic ("half-whole") diminished scales, and two have reasonably well-known applications over everyday chords. What about the third?

Yesterday I posted some initial thoughts on the "whole tone dominants" -- those altered dominant chords that are subsets of the whole tone scale. The obvious other thing to do, particularly with my current obsession with Scriabin, is to look at the "octatonic dominants" that come out of the half-whole (or whole-half) diminished scale. Caveat: this post is a bit of "primary research" -- not very exciting as at stands, but with potentially useful applications.

Two big twentieth century studies of Carnatic scales by Western composers are now available in full on YouTube. If nothing else, I think we Western musicians can benefit from hearing these scales "in our own accent" rather than solely in the context of South Indian music. They also prove that these "exotic" scales can make excellent music in a Western style, in case that still needs to be proved to anyone.

I've been playing with Common b6 Pentatonic from my previous post over the past view days and thought it would be worth noting some applications of this and the Hungarian Minor Pentatonic to major 7 chords.

Last night in the practice room I revisited this post about a mildly altered pentatonic so this morning I decided to pull out some more possibilities for combining it with familiar things.

I'm told many people enjoy it when I can't sleep and do one of these "here's some data, you sort it out" posts. If you're one of those people, this is your lucky day.

I realise this thread of posts is probably getting a bit old but I've done a bit more tidying up of my (initially flippant) project around "Hungarian pentatonics" and have some moderately nice initial results.

Here are a few more things to combine with Hungarian Minor Pentatonic, a.k.a. MiP (see also here and here) to make interesting sounds that are easy to find. Nothing new here compared with the earlier posts, just easier ways to find the same notes.

In this final instalment, I'll list out some applications of the Hungarian Altered Pentatonic -- see Part I and Part II for similar stuff, and this post for an explanation of what's going on, or just dive in.