My approach to microtonal scales and tunings

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.

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!!!