Graham English

Posts Tagged ‘scales’

Playing Outside: The Dominant 7 Pentatonic Scale Pattern 15

This will be the last dominant 7 pentatonic scale pattern in this series. This pattern begins in the “outside key” and moves to the tonic key for two notes before switching back. The second part of the pattern begins in the tonic key, switches to the “outside key” for two notes, and then returns to the tonic.

Playing Outside: The Dominant 7 Pentatonic Scale Pattern 14

Now this pattern is the exact opposite of the twelfth pattern. Every other note is transposed into the “outside key” but this pattern begins in the outside key and is a full bar long.

Playing Outside: The Dominant 7 Pentatonic Scale Pattern 13

This pattern is almost the exact opposite of the previous dominant 7 pentatonic pattern. Every other note is transposed into the “outside key” but this pattern begins in the outside key and is only two beats.

Download the full pattern:
Playing Outside: The Dominant 7 Pentatonic Scale Pattern 13
If you want to be notified the next time [...]

Playing Outside: The Dominant 7 Pentatonic Scale Pattern 12

This dominant 7 pentatonic pattern is super squiggly. Every other note is transposed into the “outside key” for superior in-the-moment transposition skills.

Playing Outside: The Dominant 7 Pentatonic Scale Pattern 11

The primary purpose of this dominant 7 pentatonic pattern is to force you to transpose keys a number of times during the bar. If you keep your wits about you as you play this pattern and don’t just memorize it without giving it any thought, you’ll start to become extremely comfortable moving between two keys at will. This pattern changes keys 5 times within a single bar.

Playing Outside: The Dominant 7 Pentatonic Scale Pattern 10

This dominant 7 pentatonic pattern sandwiches the tonic key with two full beats of the “outside” key on either side. It starts in the transposed key, moves to the tonic key, and finishes in the transposed key.

Playing Outside: The Dominant 7 Pentatonic Scale Pattern 9

This dominant 7 pentatonic pattern spends a full beat in the original key, modulates to the “outside” key for two full beats, and then returns to the original key for the final beat.

You can play around with this pattern and find some useful alternatives. Try pushing the pattern back a beat so it starts on [...]

Playing Outside: The Dominant 7 Pentatonic Scale Pattern 8

Similar to dominant 7 pentatonic pattern 3, just by playing around with two different scales, we can invoke many more different keys and harmonic shapes. This is the first pattern to start in the “outside” key.

Download the full pattern:
Playing Outside: The Dominant 7 Pentatonic Scale Pattern 8

Playing Outside: The Dominant 7 Pentatonic Scale Pattern 7

This dominant 7 pentatonic pattern gets challenging again. Like the previous pattern, it spends more time in the “outside” key. Only the first and fifth notes are in the original key. This means that you have to switch keys a total of three times during the entire eight-note phrase.

A useful exercise is to take a [...]

Playing Outside: The Dominant 7 Pentatonic Scale Pattern 6

This dominant 7 pentatonic pattern spends more time in the “outside” key. Only the first full beat of each phrase is in the original key. Without looking at this pattern, can you play it? You should be getting more comfortable switching keys. Even if it doesn’t feel completely natural, you might be able to imagine [...]

Playing Outside: The Dominant 7 Pentatonic Scale Pattern 5

This dominant 7 pentatonic pattern gets tougher again. It has four notes in C and four notes in D flat but they are all spread throughout the bar.

How To Use Tension And Release In Your Melodies

Music, much like life, is fundamentally a swinging pendulum between tension and release. Fortunately, with music, this is easy to represent objectively and to utilize in your music composition.

Fantastic Music Theory Resource

Dolmetsch online has made significant contributions to the world of early music. They also host a serious online music dictionary and composers biography. I especially like their 1000+ scales and practical guide to composition. Check it out.

Define: Raga

1. A generic term for Indian scales, consisting of five, six, or seven different notes and calculated to create a certain mood. Each raga is suited to a particular time of day. The word itself comes from the Sanskrit meaning “color,” so that an infinite variety of nuances is possible in the playing of ragas [...]

Top Secret Patterns (shhh, they’re free!)

Patterns are a great way of putting scales to work. Not only do they get you out of any do-re-mi rut, they expand your musical vocabulary. They also expand your mind by forcing you to think about systems within systems—and sometimes within other systems. For example, this diminished pattern is a three note system:

within another [...]

Who Else Wants To Master the Diminished Scale?

The diminished scale is an extremely creative tool. Due to the diminished chord’s symmetrical structure of stacked minor thirds, we have two options of diminished scales: half step-whole step and whole step-half step.

A major benefit to this scale is that you only have to learn it in three different keys since it repeats itself every [...]

The Golden Mean in Harmony Part 1

If you ride chaos all the way out to its edge, you find beauty and order… and the Blues
Chaos: complete disorder and confusion; behavior so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions; the formless matter supposed to have existed before the creation of the universe.
Chaos theory: The branch [...]