Synthetic scales. Something science fiction about the name. And they are a bit sci-fi, really, in terms of their musical manufacture: being as they are, artificially created for a compositional purpose. And certain synthetic scales indeed lend themselves to conjuring futuristic soundscapes and alien worlds. To be blinkered to their broader possibilities is to miss their potential for the mystical, revelatory and transcendent. And countless other musical emotions, too!
Doesn’t that make you want to sing them? Well, in the above video, we do just that! Crafting magical vocal runs from these exhilarating, if cerebral, tonalities.
We explore…
The Augmented Scale: a hexatonic (six-note) scale created by alternating augmented seconds and minor seconds (or you can think of it like stacking the tones from augmented chords a minor-third apart), which can range from the dreamy to the sinister.
The Half-Whole Diminished Scale: an octatonic (eight-note) scale made up of alternating half-steps and whole steps, which is a surprisingly functional tonality that shows up in countless genre contexts, and can evoke bluesy flavor and exotic flair alike.
The Tritone Scale: constructed by the scheme of combining the tones from two major chords a tritone apart, yielding another hexatonic scale that sounds like it’s warping reality around itself.
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