Contents
3. Scales with Tendency Tones
So far the candidate for omission is always fa or ti. But omitting other notes is also possible, of-course.
Indonesian Scale
For example, omitting re and la brings totally the opposite result; the proportion of half-step greatly increases.
It is known as a scale used in Gamelan, a traditional music in Indonesia.
The performance sounds quite mystical mainly due to the instruments and the song arrangement, but partly due to the melodies full of half-step motion as well.
And another note is that the tonal center is not much clear here than in Western music; phrases often emphasize mi, not do. Here again, contexts and tendencies are important factors to analyze.
Middle Eastern Scale
Then, what if you add even more half-steps by adding flattened re and la? There’ll be four pairs of half-steps.
Now it’s like Middle Eastern sound! It really is a scale found in arabic/indian/persian areas.
Again these exotic moods could be partly attributed to the myriad of half-steps. Thus, if you make up a scale by arbitrarily choosing 5-8 notes, it’s highly likely that the outcome corresponds to some ethnic scales.
Microtonal Music
In these ethnic genres, by the way, semitone is not the minimum unit of pitch; they have quarter tones (or even finer).
What “quarter” means is : The scale above involves a tone between E♭ and E, and a tone between B♭ and B. You may feel it out of tune but actually it’s not. It’s just out of the 12-tone world of the piano keyboard.
Tunings finer than semitone are called Microtunings and music containing microtunings is called Microtonal Music.
You can find examples of artists incorporating such microtuning traditions into popular music when you peek into the Middle Eastern hit charts.
“Saah Bass” is a song by Mohammed Bin Grman, a Saudi Arabian music producer. He is famous for blending traditional music into pop, and you can find interesting expressions not only in scales but also in rhythms that are not found in Western traditions. Diversity! That’s the engine driving the evolution of popular music in the 21st century.
Microtonal music is not discussed in this text. Google it if you get interested😅
4. Ethnic Scales and Bass Music
Since Western music theory is based on major/minor key system, these ethnic scales are scarcely featured in it. But they’re getting attention from recent bass music producers because it’s much easier to incorporate non-Western scales in the genres where all you need is just a lead and a bass.
As mentioned in the preparation part, choosing scale tones is like picking up color pencils for drawing. Having non-Western scales as alternative options will greatly expand your “color palettes”.
Mi-centered Minor
On the other hand, ethnic scales inevitably ties a song to a specific ethnicity. If you want a new scale without any ethnic links, there’s a good candidate for that: Just use a minor scale but center around mi, not la.
As you’ve just seen in the example of Indonesian performance, ambiguating the tonal center bears attractively mystical feeling. No wonder the technique is applied also to Western scales.
This is it! Just repeating phrases such as mi–fa–mi, mi–re–mi or so–fa–mi easily brings the sounds you often hear in genres like trap, dubstep, psytrance or goa.
At this stage, there’s no need to grasp the theoretical background of this technique. Just keep it as one of the practical options in dance music. So remember it like this: Centralize do for a bright mood, la for a dark mood and mi for an even darker and heavier mood1.
Pentatonic, omit-4, omit-2/6, mi-centered minor……Looking outside the realm of the Classical major/minor key system, you can find a plenty of interesting ideas that can bring drastically different sounds.
And the basic mechanisms like tone tendencies or half-step/whole-step motion will help you understand musical characteristics of such scales.
Summary
- The omit-4 scale is like a hybrid of major and pentatonic where ti is utilized for half-step motion.
- Omitting re and la naturally increases the proportion of half-step motion.
- There are countless scales available. If you want some unfamiliar sound, it will be worth looking for some.
