The Half-Whole (or Whole-Half) Diminished scale has eight notes. What happens if we delete one? It turns out there are only two ways to do this, but each produces a seven-note scale with a full complement of modes.

The Carnatic melakatas form a system of 72 seven-note scales. What happens if we play them upside down?

This little cluster of four notes can expand your vocabulary and open the door to exotic scales and chords, including both conventional jazz stuff and more far-out weirdness. I find this especially useful for finding things on piano (which I'm not very good at) but it applies to anything really.

Dharmavati and Neetimati have come up a couple of times in my practice so I thought it was time to look more closely at them. I'm especially interested in learning to hear the differences between them as both can be thought of as "Lydian minor" sounds that seem initially very similar. When I dug into it a bit more deeply, I found a third member of the same family, and then of course a bunch more.

I didn't tell anyone about them. Here's what I was up to and how you can hear them if you'd like to.

This is a continuation from an earlier post that looked at All Interval Tetrachords. Here we look at some recipes for building their bigger siblings, the All Trichord Hexachords, on the fly and some ideas for using them.

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.