Ok, so I thought I'd write this given that alot of people seem to like what I have done with Mavila and Mohajira, I'd like to help others get their feet wet in this amazing sounds. This is my approach and it may not work for everybody, and everyone may not agree with it but you've all heard this disclaimer slapped at the beginning of EVERY TUTORIAL ONLINE lol. Anyway, keep reading and may'be you'll learn something. :)
1."How do you go about learning to play in a new tuning/scale? I always can't seem to do anything that I'm happy with..."
RULE #1: LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN!
Firstly, unlike alot of others who play microtonal music, I tend to take a more cautious approach in order to find sounds I like, and to not play sounds I don't like. This is ironic given that I'm extremely experimental when it comes to music anyway but I do it in a way which I find to be more- I don't wanna say tasteful cuz I sound like a snob lol- a way which would appeal to myself and that others than myself would enjoy it. I have always had this sort of attitude of wanting to warm people to microtonal music without scaring them off. While there is nothing wrong with this sort of music, a large portion of microtonal music is very complex, very experimental, even beyond tuning. Many micromusicans find joy in doing the most outside the box thing possible and that's totally awesome but it's not what I find interesting.
The first thing I do is I listen alot to a new scale. This is crucial, you can't make music if you don't have a good feel for the scale you're working with, right? I'm not comfortable with just jumping right in a pounding something out, it doesn't ever work for me. I may just run the scale up and down in my fingers and listen to the melodic jumps. Once I listen to the scale a bit, the next thing I do is try to find some good sounds or melodic ideas. I used to not have any idea what to do with a tuning but now I've gotten alot faster at finding sounds I like. It's a good idea to write down what they are though I admittedly don't always do this.
RULE #2: MELODY
Good melodies are somewhat repetitious, and at least a little bit singable. Melody is something alot of microtonal music lacks, there is alot of melody but I still think the majority isn't meant to be very melodic. To be honest, my approach to melody is just to play something. That's it, there isn't any magic, I just mess around and listen to a scale to find ideas. the melodies in my pieces generally are most improvised with perhaps a motif idea established before hand.
Here's an example of a melody I improvised:
All of my pieces have a nice melody in them. Ironically, my 12 EDO pieces generally have very little melody to them. The best way to get a good melody, I've found, is to listen intently to the skips and steps in the scale. If you have a scale of Lssssss then really pay attention to the difference at the L step.
RULE #3: GET AWAY FROM DIATONIC TRIADS!
This is something I think alot of people in the xen world seem to have trouble with is the idea of letting go of diatonic triads. Tunings like 16 EDO, although some argue otherwise, do not have decent perfect fifths. That's why I don't use major and minor triads to harmonize any of the 16 EDO MOS scales. My approach varies from scale to scale with how I actually go about finding chords to use. You can do literally anything, but finding good chord movement can be tricky. Here's a little outline for you.
STEP One - Find something that you do not want to use as a fundamental resolved harmony in your chords. This may sound like you're limiting yourself to isolated harmony and preventing yourself from utilizing dissonance for tension but the fact is, you need to first establish some type of ground work. You'll end up using this later anyway, but for now, what do you not want in a resolved chord?
For me in Mavila, it was the flat fifth which I think represents an entirely different ratio than 3/2. Guess what? Many of my 16 edo songs use it in triads but it's not a fundamental harmony, it is simply an additional pitch similar to the way a major ninth works in 12 EDO major chords. It adds dissonance and color to the chords. Which you can hear in the third piece in this collection:
STEP Two - Find some chord which sounds rooted. This can take alot of pecking around but if you're lucky, you'll find a beautiful triad or cool sounding triad which your scale of choice is well supplied with. In Meantone, major and minor triads work perfectly. In mavila, you still have a good number of major and minor triads but now you have a badly tuned fifth making them, in my opinion, unsuitable as stable harmonies. At least on piano they are.
What I did was tried stacking two sizes of sevenths on top of each other the same way meantone does with stacking two sizes of thirds to form triads. I ended up with three triad types: Hard, Soft, and Symmetrical. They turned out to not only sound good in isolation but they sound incredibly musical in chord progressions. The hard triad is constructed of an 11/6 stacked on a 7/4 while the soft triad is the same in reverse. The symmetrical triad which has the least tonal stability is two 11/6's stacked on one another. These triads have formed the literal building blocks of all my mavila and even some of my Gorgo[6] pieces. I have even found that this type of harmony works well in other scales such as porcupine or even superpyth though the harmonies are fundamentally quite different.
Here's the entire Mavila[7] MOS harmonized with these triads:
They have a sort of odd, asian-metallic dark sound. Though much of that comes from the particular mode of Mavila[7].
Step Three: Find another triad for voice leading
While the seventh's triads are pretty and work very well for mavila, they weren't enough. In fact, I soon came to realize that they were merely inversions of secondual triads built from well, two sizes of seconds. Hard small triad was 11/10 on top of 8/7 and the Soft small triad was 8/7 on top of 11/10 there was also a symmetrical small triad of 11/10 stacked on top of each other. The quirky thing was, while the seventh's triads are inversions of these small secondual triads, for some reason, the chords were separate from each other. The 1st inversion of the secondual triads sound rooted and as a chord in it's own right. This means that a chord built as CBbAb is not merely an inversion of AbBbC as CBbAb with C in the bass sounds fully rooted in mavila.
Ultimately, the large sevenths triads sound darker and more exotic than the small secondual triads do. The mixture of the two sounds makes harmonizing with them even more interesting.
Here they are together:
This is only one approach. Another one is to establish some form of a basic five note chord (normally the first five pitches of a your position of your scale) in which any combination of notes that includes the root is a fully resolved harmony. This works very well in porcupine[7] in which you use a 1 3 9 11 chord as a tonic tetrad or even just 1 5 11 if you want somethings more unique and even simpler. You can of course combine such harmonies with 1st inversion of the first three notes of that pitch set for more variety and fun. This approach is good because it in porcupine you end up with an 8:9:10:11:12 chord as your major pentad which is a pretty sick chord in it of itself. :)
Once you get some harmony idea, try moving things around to different pitches in the scale and see what happens. You'll probably get a sour chord you don't like but just try to find something to do with it. I've found you can make a great chord on any note in your scale, I don't care what scale it is.
RULE #4 Try using counter point
Sometimes scales are very complex and difficult to establish a set method of harmonization. Nine tone scales like triforce and semaphore can be tricky to work with because they are intricate. In this case, it's good to just start with some good ol' fashion counter point. And no, I'm not talking about that Bach music theory I counter point. When I say counter point, I mean playing two independent melodic lines in which harmony is a bi product of. Start with a simply bass line and build a melody off of it. It can be complex like a jazz bass line or it could be simply droning a single pitch and moving the pitch around once and a while.
Example of me using mainly counter point for the main motif:
Ok so I know it's not entirely counter point but you get the idea.
RULE #5: KEEP IT SIMPLE!!
In the experimental world, you can get away with alot more crazy stuff if you keep things simple. My rule is, the more odd and unfamiliar something is, the simpler you should keep things. The reason is because often in something unfamiliar or alien, you can make something far better by leaving out the bells and whistles and just trying to first make something sound good rather than impress others.
When you have a firm grasp on the scale, you can start throwing in extra dissonance or extended harmony and what not. Remember you're working with something new and relatively uncharted so it will not be as easy as trying to write or improvise in the major scale. It takes careful listening to write really good microtonal music. Again, not claiming my stuff is the best out there but I'm quite happy with what I have accomplished. :)
Have fun, I hope this helped some of you who are just starting out in this stuff.
