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?

I've been experimenting with a couple of things lately and decided to start uploading some rough results to YouTube. One thing is improvising with a synthesizer and then using that as "raw material" for a composition; the other is techniques for making raw, non-tonal noise using a fairly traditional synthesiser.

My Paul-Scheerbart-inspired album is available now on Bandcamp, with other platforms coming shortly (iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music etc).

A bit more info below the fold...

For a start, I'm selling most of my gear. That isn't really it, though.

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?

So I had this weird idea of taking the Carnatic melakatas, which are 7-note scales, and mapping them onto the white keys of a piano keyboard. Then tuning each black note to be exactly between the white notes either side of it. By this method we get 12-note subsets of 24-EDO that are maybe interesting or fun to play with? I don't know.

After a bit of exploration into quarter-tones I thought I'd add to my collection of EDO-based 12-note tunings by exploring third-tones, which split the gap between (say) C and D into three equal parts rather than the usual two. The EDO made entirely of this interval is 18-EDO, which we can think of as three equally-spaced whole-tone scales.