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Improvising with Exotic Scales - Part 1
(30 Oct 03)
A new old approach
Those are only two of the thousands of possibilities out there, and I won't include all of them in this article, and even if I did there are very few of us that will sit down with all the possible examples and go through them one by one. So I'd rather show you how to come up with your own exotic sounding scales.
There's an old Chinese proverb that says "If you give a man a fish you have fed him once, but if you teach him how to fish you have fed him for the rest of his life". I have given you a couple of fish so far so let's see how we fish:
One of the best tools for composers and improvisers is to restrain themselves to just a few notes and rhythms (The article by Steve Vai where he talks about playing just one note for one hour is an extreme example of this approach), by limiting your options you're forcing yourself to be creative in order not to get bored to death… you may be thinking "what the heck does this have to do with the article??? I want more scales!!" but bear with me, we'll get there soon :D...
Ok, so how do we use this approach to come up with "new" exotic scales? Well first up take all scales you know and deliberately reduce them to 5 scale degrees; if you do that with the chromatic scale you'll come up with some wacky scales, and just like before, keep what you like and forget what you don't..
Check out this other scale it sounds Indian to me, it's a Phrygian scale without 5th (yeah this is a 6 tone scale) but harmonically it can also be interpreted as a Phrygian scale with no 6th and a raised 5th (F = E#).
Here's the PowerTab file of the above.
Don't forget to fiddle around with its different modes as well.
You can also get some interesting sounds out of the old diatonic scales, try raising (sharpening) or lowering (flatting) one or more of the scale degrees and you'll come up with some interesting stuff, take for instance the 3rd mode of the harmonic minor scale (Phrygian dominant Scale) and raise the 7th and you'll have a “double harmonic scale” also known as gypsy scale.
Check out this really weird scale I learned a long time ago (I think from one of the Marty Friedman's solo's or something), someone named it Bhairava (rather weird name if you ask me but so is the scale) It has a flat 2nd a, major 3rd perfect 4th dim 5th major 6th and a minor 7th It's very intriguing harmonically speaking; check it out:
Here's the PowerTab file of the above.
Make sure you experiment with the different modes of this scale as well.
Feel free to alter these scale patterns and come up with your own, use whatever feels the most natural and comfortable to you.
I hope you have enjoyed this first introduction to exotic scales; in the near future I am planning on writing some more follow up articles with some more practical information on how to apply these scales to musical situations.
Signing off for now,
Jorge Maldonado
Songwriter/Guitarist/Instructor
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Guitarist, instructor and songwriter, Jorge, a.k.a. forgottenking2 is one of the top contributers in the iBreatheMusic community. Check out his website.
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