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'm not a jazz musician but I've spent my whole adult life listening to it and have done lots of jazz-adjacent music and occasionally dabbled in bit of capital-J Jazz. I'm thinking a lot about what "repertoire" means in my current practice and although it surely doesn't mean a list of Great American Songbook tunes I might still be able to learn from the way I've interacted with those in the past. (I promise there are Actual Ideas included alongside the navel-gazing.)

This week I started a half-serious project to bring my first guitar -- a cheap Kay acoustic from the 1980s -- back to life. I knew it wasn't going to be a "normal" guitar, since it was never good at being one of those and decades of poor storage have left it warped beyond reasonable repair. If I wanted an acoustic guitar, I'd be much better off dropping £100 on a Chinese one on eBay. I pulled the frets out a few years ago in an attempt to make something vaguely oud-like but that didn't work at all, and since then it's been moping around my studio getting in the way.

The Lulu Chord is what I call a chord formed by playing a perfect fifth with a perfect fourth nestled inside it: for example, C-C#-F#-G. The outer notes, C-G are the fifth and the inner ones, C#-F#, are the fourth. This chord is non-diatonic and, as far as I know, unknown in tonal music. But it was very popular with the Second Viennese School and is a good thing to get a handle on if you're looking for some modernist vocabulary.

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.

I was told something today that surprised me and sent me scurrying off to try it: Any non-overlapping combination of a minor third interval and a tritone interval contains all the possible intervals. Such chords are known as all-interval tetrachords (AITs). I've heard of them for years but never saw how to use them; as usual, it was just a matter of someone showing me the "right" way (for me) to look at them.

Recently I've been returning to early 20th century piano music. The stuff I like often features elements from tonal harmony (such as triad-based chords) combined in non-functional ways. These are also easy to think about and find when improvising. This post started off being about playing seventh chords separated by a semitone but ended up summarizing the wider context of this in my own music.

I went on a bit of an adventure with this yesterday and thought I might be able to spare the next person the trouble, although in the end it wasn't too bad. If you have SWAM instruments and hate the way they've implemented microtuning on the GUI, MTS-ESP can be a huge help. Here are my notes, based on setting it up with Reaper (any DAW will work the same way, though).

In the previous ii-V-I post I outlined what I take to be the most standard, well-known ways to play a ii-V-I. This is a quick note of a well-known fact about them.

I guess everybody knows the ii-V-I is the most important chord sequence in jazz. A lot of folks also know that there are about a million ways to play it that aren't, in fact, ii-V-I at all. So what's going on with that?