I recently went through an exercise of writing a lot of tunes using Suvarnangi or, more accurately, a mode of Suvarnangi. This scale seems very lumpy and dissonant when you just run it up and down so here I'll break down how I think of it and some of the secrets it contains. Because as with any seven-note scale, what seems like nothing much turns out to contain a whole universe when we stick it under the microscope.

It was 96 because 100 isn't divisible by 12 and I don't know whether you actually should or not but I do have things to say about what was good about it for me.

Forte's set number 6-z6 can be played as C-C#-D-F-F#-G, which doesn't look like much. I found it today while trying to capture a bit of Sorabji's style and got some nice vocabulary ideas from it on the theme of intervals moving in contrary motion.

The all-but-six (ABS) chords are Forte 6-1, 6-8, 6-14 and 6-32. They're all six-note chords that contain every interval except the tritone. Of these, I think 6-8 and 6-14 are particularly promising.

I, working alone on a hobby project, added MTS-ESP support to my plugin in 40 minutes, and it only took that long because I made a silly mistake and spent half an hour tracking it down.

I've been messing about with the JUCE framework for years but never really finished something enough to put it out into the world. Finally, I did, so go and grab it and see if you find it useful. That's all.

This post is a bit of a continuation of the previous one on "expanded Harmonic Minor". The idea is again to take a somewhat familiar idea of playing something a semitone above or below the root of a chord, and flip it to be below or above, as it were. These ideas came out of playing through the chords to "Blue in Green", which isn't to say they're particularly applicable to that tune but more that they came from a real musical context, not some abstract theoretical observation.

We can think of the Harmonic Minor scale as a minor triad with a diminished seventh chord a semitone below it. In fact, I'd guess this is how the scale originally came about, and you can hear this relationship frequently in the music of Bach's time. This post is about an expanded version of that idea.

Following up on this recent post that used the minor major 7 (mM7) chord, here's a quick description of what happens when you combine a pair of them. It turns out there are only three different ways to do this.