CW14

I’d long been interested in erasing notes from scales, as least as early as writing my book Nonmusical Patterns and their Musical Uses (for Guitar in Standard Tuning) (which I began in 2005, finished in 2007, was published by a friend in a small run a few years later, and has long been out of print). But it wasn’t until the late 2010s that I heard of the “gospel scale” (from a Jacob Collier video?), a major scale with no TI. Leave it (again) to betweenness—on the bridge between the major scale and major pentatonic, no less—to hold gold, to hide gold from the eye trained only on the poles. It was quite shocking what that one subtraction did—it sounds like gospel music! It was the same feeling as middle school, when someone miraculously showed me the correct way to play some bit of classic rock I had wrong.

If you start on the home triad and chord climb up, every chord will be I or ii, alternating (I do think it was a Collier video; I think this detail was in there).

And, of course, this will work with any hexatonic scale, as long as you construct your home trichord the same way, by skipping over one scale degree between each note. Here’s a random six-note scale:

Here’s that same all-just-two-chords chord climb technique (this one is interesting):

I can’t resist one more:

It was playing with the gospel scale in different tonal contexts—modes, plus over DOs that aren’t in the scale—that led me, a few years ago, to make up “new major” and “new minor,” which in turn led to the scale from CW11.

To be continued…