Balinese and Thai Guitar Scales

If you've ever heard gamelan music from Bali or Thailand, you'll know that it sounds quite different from anything western. Well, some of our minimalist, modernist music may fit into the category slightly but the point is, they use an entirely different scale set than we do.  Today's post is about looking at the two scales used in Gamelan music and how we can approximate these scales on a 24 tone guitar.  Before I go on, I realize that 24 ET isn't quite the same thing as gamelan scales BUT it can get close enough to where you can get the same effect virtually. Since Gamelan music is pretty much devoid of harmony and is more about melodic polyphony, the slight tuning difference doesn't even matter because no one will care.

Here's a taste of this incredible style:

Gamelan music uses two sets of pitches. Slendro and Pelog. You may have heard of the pelog scale on guitar websites which is something like a minor scale without the fourth and seventh pitch. This scale is NOT PELOG! These scales cannot be approximated at all in 12 ET because it doesn't even remotely approximate these intervals. The imitation pelog that 12 ET has is very close to the japanese Hirajoshi scale but calling it Pelog is like calling a cheese burger an authentic Indian dish.  It simply is not.  24 ET tunes Pelog a bit differently than traditional standards but it still works enough to where most people couldn't tell a difference. But I'm certainly not claiming that 24 ET tunes these scales authentically, rather they are slightly fudged approximations of those scales which can be played in a system compatible with western harmony.

15 ET may tune Slendro better and 14 ET may tune Pelog better but 24 ET is about as close as you're going to get to having both scales in the same chromatic set of pitches without having a rather large scale set such as 34 ET.

Slendro

Slendro is a five tone scale heavily used in Gamelan music. I won't make efforts to tell you when it is used because i'm still new to Gamelan music and google shows nothing for looking that up. 

For shame Google....

Anyway, the scale is said to be roughly five equally spaced pitches in an octave BUT I'm not sure myself. I hear something very close to semaphore[5] but it's probably not exactly the same. While I'm not terribly concerned with historic accuracy of a tuning, it's close enough for my purposes since it sounds mostly like it.

The Slendro or Semaphore Pentatonic scale has the structure of L L s L L in it's most usual mode. Here's the scale across the fretboard:

As you can see, the large steps in Slendro are ultra seconds you know, the intervals which blur the line between minor thirds and major seconds? This scale is a pretty cool scale to solo with, since it's a pentatonic, you can kind of use it like one. Slendro doesn't sound bluesy but asian, even more so than a normal pentatonic due to those weird wide tones all over the place.

Since Slendro in 24 ET or Semaphore is literally spliting perfect fourths in half, it works really well to use it over quartal harmony. Gives it an open, modern feel.

Ok enough about Slendro, let's look at Pelog!!

Pelog 

Pelog is a seven tone scale which is pretty much to other most common scale in Gamelan. You know, there might be just two but I'm not gonna make statements I know little about hehe.  

Pelog is similar to Mohajira in that it uses major tones and neutral tones only but the distribution is quite different. The structure of pelog is s s L s s L L with the small step being a neutral tone and Large step being a major tone.

Going back to that other scale, you know, the horrible 12 ET imitation of Pelog. Yeah, well that would look this in 24 ET:

That scale is a pentatonic variation using the 1 2 3 5 and 6 degree of the seven tone scale. Gamelan music does, in fact, tend to use only five notes in a piece which I guess may be like a diatonic system where as seven tones make the chromatic scale. 

So there you have it, getting these scales under your finger tips can be very useful.  Lastly, this guy shows you what these scales sound like on a real gamelan, you should be able to hear that they're fairly close to the 24 ET variation but of course, they're not the same exactly. That's not really the point though is it?  Of well, it works for me so it'll probably work for others  

HAVE FUN!!!