The Synthetic Scale Thread

[rectifryer]

Seems like the human mind only cars about the last few notes, this makes it possible to shift scales and still sound good if not better when done properly.

 

[Holy Katana]

Woo, I found a cool one that's actually musical. It's basically a major scale with a lowered sixth and seventh, or, in C:
C D E F G Ab Bb

The harmonies are:
I iiº iiiº iv v VI+ VII

Now, many of those chords don't work out so well in a major progression, so I'm going to say that one could borrow the iiº, IVsus4, and VII from this scale with pleasing effect.

That's Mixolydian b6, the fifth mode of melodic minor. One of my favorite scales to use. One really cool thing you can do with it is to play an ascending dominant 7th arpeggio, and descend with a dominant 7th #5 arpeggio. Or the other way around, if you'd like.

 

[ixlramp]

I removed my post

 

[BlackMetalVenom]

Hmmm...Can't believe no one's put this hear yet.

Basically a Pentatonic Major with an added 7th or a Major Scale with an omitted 4th.

The intervals are:
1,2,3,5,6,7

I've dubbed it the "Celtic" Scale. Reason for this is that I've noticed these intervals used in a lot of old traditional Celtic tunes for violin. It's a beautiful scale for sure.

Hope you guys enjoy it.

 

[bostjan]

There are a finite number of scales in standard tuning... something like 43 families from which modal theory can generate any heptatonic or pentatonic scale. (There are several theoretical families that are entirely useless, like the ones generated by all half steps and a huge make-up step).

Most exotic scales you see in guitar grimoires and scale books are actually gross approximations to real scales used in various parts of the world.

Anyway, my all-time favorites:

Iwato
1 b2 4 b5 b7
(i.e. in C = C Db F Gb Bb C)

Hungarian Minor
1 2 b3 #4 5 b6 7
(i.e. in C = C D Eb F# G Ab B)

Byzantine a.k.a. Double Harmonic a.k.a. Overtone (which is cofamiliar with the Hungarian Minor listed above)

Also, any octatonic scales that are well-known heptatonics with added sevenths, i.e.
1 2 3 4 5 6 b7 7 or
1 2 b3 4 5 b6 b7 7 or
1 b2 b3 4 b5 b6 b7 7

I like the Byzantine scale mentioned above with this concept added to make a sort of Spanish-Gibraltarish sound:
1 b2 3 4 5 b6 b7 7
especially on classical guitar.

Also, the WH and HW diminished scales:
1 2 b3 4 b5 b6 bb7 7 (WH) and
1 b2 b3 b4 b5 bb6 bb7 7 (HW)
are great for building tension, particularly over a V7 chord.
1 b2 3 4 5 b6 7
(i.e. in C = C Db E F G Ab B)

 

[mortality]

E - F - G - Ab - B - C - D - D# - E Basically took your standard phrygian scale and built up to the flat 6th in a Phrygian Dominant hexachord from the third.

1-b2-b3-b4-5-6-b7-7

 

[mortality]

sorry it was supposed to read b6

 

[Kroaton]

C - D - Eb - F - F# - G - A - Bb - Blues Octatonic scale.

C - D - Eb - F# - G - A - Bb - Romanian Minor.

Let's keep this baby alive.

 

[IamOthello]

One of my favorite things to do while in a natural minor scale is start a lead that suspends from fourth to a major third from the root, like so.

say the progression is like..

C G Eb Bb
Eb Ab C G
Bb F D C
C G E C

take a lead and rest it on F, then lower it a halfstep and making a major triad out of the root chord, which is normally minor in this case.

So it's effectively, C D Eb E F G Ab Bb. :]

 

[Wolf ov Fire]

One of my favorites is essentially an inverted major scale. NOT a mode, but literally playing the note structure of the major scale backwards, yet ascending in pitch.

Tl;dr: C C# D# E F# G# A# C

This can be shown as a series of half steps: 1-2-2-1-2-2-2 from the root

 

[Mr. Big Noodles]

That's technically the seventh mode of C# melodic minor, but the way you're thinking of it is pretty cool.

 

[Pooluke41]

While watching my Malcom in the middle marathon I came up with an idea.

You assign each note a number, I do it; 1, 2, 3....
Because 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 (As I think it is with 12 tone rows?) Is just illogical too me,

1 = C
2 = C#
3 = D
4 = D#
5 = E
6 = F
7 = F#
8 = G
9 = G#
10 = A
11 = A#
12 = B

Then you choose numbers at random however you want. I've counted the amount of CD's inbetween gaps in my DVD rack when I first tried this.

So lets say we get;

3 6 8 9 2 5 4 1 7 12 10 11

Then we group it, I've grouped it like this...

So now it's in two groups.(I group every two)

3 8 2 4 7 10 And 6 9 5 1 12 11

I put it into order.

2 3 4 7 8 10 and 1 5 6 9 11 12

These are

1 = C#, D, D#, F#, G, A
2 = C , E, F , G#,A#, B

Ta-Da! Two new scales.

That pattern was preeeettttyyyy shit but I want to try this with the fibbonaci sequence.....

Please excuse me if you cannot understand this, but I didn't sleep last night.. While watching Malcom in the middle...

 

[Pooluke41]

Whilst messing around with my pattern thing, I found these two scales.

C# D E G A B (Locrian with no 4th I think)

C D# F F# G# A# (Locrian with no 2nd I think)

 

[Mr. Big Noodles]

If you wanted to label the first collection as a scale, C# locrian would suffice; the absence of one tone in a diatonic collection doesn't necessarily make it a new entity. This reminds me of the scales section of John Braheny's "The Craft and Business of Songwriting"; he lists a few scales as "Major 7-tone", "Major 6-tone", "Minor 7-tone" and "Minor 6-tone", and the six-tone variants are only missing the seventh. Riiiight.

The second one is B# locrian. Or C locrian, if you prefer. Either way, they're both missing the second (D or Cx).

I will point out that you're using a serial method for producing these collections, and you don't necessarily need to call the resulting pitch material a scale. There is nothing wrong with identifying similarities between your synthetic pitch material and preexisting pitch material, however, and I would even encourage that. It all depends on the way that you utilize your materials, though. The procedure described in your previous post, I imagine, would lend itself well to a composition wherein two pitch collections, which complement to form a full chromatic collection, are juxtaposed. Something to the same effect is done in the first song here:

John Harbison - Mirabai Songs - I. Why Mira Can't Go Back to Her House


The chromatic scale is stratified into the white notes on the piano (A B C D E F G) and the black notes (F# G# A# C# D#), and Harbison works with that 7+5 arrangement. Overall, the piece uses the chromatic scale, but you really can't describe it that simply - it's how the chromatic collection is divided that gives the piece its character.

 

[Aspiringmaestro]

(Guitar Book) Nicolas Slonimsky - Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns A scribd link to the book referenced at the beginning of this thread.

 

[Jaryth]

Any Scriabin fans on this board?

 

[Mr. Big Noodles]

He's of mild interest to me.

 

[ncfiala]

Hey guys, new here. I posted in the beginner section so if you've got any advice I'd appreciate it. Anyway, I made up this pentatonic scale I call the fibonacci scale (sorry, I'm a mathematician). I think in terms of intervals so here is the interval structure:

half step, half step, whole step, whole and a half step, 2 wholes and a half step.

Here is a manageable fingering of the scale in the key of F#:

e---------------------------------------14-15-16
b---------------------------------11-14
G------------------------11-12-13
D-------------------8-11
A-----------9-10-11
E-------6-9
B-7-8-9

I hate to base the idea on the fibonacci sequence and continue to perpetuate the idea that there is something really important or mystical about it (there isn't), but I wanted to base it on something mathematical that most people have probably heard of. Laymen are always fascinated (mathematicians not so much) by all of the identities that the terms of the fibonacci sequence satisfy. What they fail to recognize is that the fibonacci sequence is recursive and that any recursive sequence will satisfy similar identites.

 

[Mr. Big Noodles]

An interesting approach. So you know, music analysts refer to a pattern of smaller intervals developing into larger intervals as "intervallic expansion" (a self-explanatory term), and the inverse as "intervallic contraction". A similar pattern to yours is found in nature as the harmonic series. As a mathematician, you may be familiar with the harmonic series already. You can see that it exhibits intervallic contraction as the series progresses:

Some composers have collapsed the first fourteen partials of the harmonic series into a single octave to theoretically make music that reflects the nature of a single note's overtones. When used in this fashion, some musicologists call it the "acoustic scale", referring to its origins in acoustic physics. An acoustic scale on A (to be consistent with the above image) is A B C# D# E F# G, whose scale degrees are 1 2 3 #4 5 6 b7.

Others have interpreted the same scale in a combinatorial way: they see it as a hybrid between the lydian mode (A B C# D# E F# G#, 1 2 3 #4 5 6 7) and the mixolydian mode (A B C# D E F# G, 1 2 3 4 5 6 b7). When conceived in this way, it has many names, such as lydian-mixolydian (duh), or lydian dominant ('dominant' refers to the tonic seventh chord being a dominant seventh quality, as in 1 3 5 b7). Less inventive ones include "lydian b7" and "mixolydian #4".

If you're into the link between music and mathematics, I recommend that you look into the works of Béla Bartók. He made frequent and likely conscious use of fibonacci sequences, the golden mean, intervallic expansion and contraction, references to the harmonic series (he's one of the exponents of the acoustic scale), and, perhaps most importantly, symmetry. I can show you how he uses some of this stuff, if you want.

 

[ncfiala]

Here's one I'm calling the pentatonic strictly unimodal palindromic scale. The interval structure is:

half step, whole and a helf step, two whole steps, whole and a half step, half step.

Here's a 2nps fingering in F#:

e---------------------------6-10
b-----------------------7-8
G------------------7-10
D--------------5-8
A----------8-9
E-----6-10
B-7-8

Note that I'm not using the term unimodal to refer to the scale having only one mode (it of course has five) but in the sense of sequences. A finite sequence of real numbers is strictly unmodal if it increases and then decreases. There is of course one other way to do this with a pentatonic scale but it would have a three whole step jump in the middle.