update vis-a-vis disaster status
disorganized and concluded(?) thoughts
soooo i've been looking for scales which are melodically strong and mostly consonant. it turns out a lot of more xen chords are kind of harder to adjust to, so i ended up focusing on quartal/quintal and triadic harmony. this leaves us with a few options:
- diatonic | zarlino. if it ain't broke, why fix it? the diatonic & pentatonic scales are perennial favorites across basically every human culture. i like to use them for 3-limit rather than 5-limit harmony. if you pick the right edo, you can shift one of the notes in the diatonic scale to access xen sonorities while also preserving big chains of fifths! 17edo is a recent favorite for this method, and it lets you approximate a lot of maqamat (at least as scales) in a very style-flexible way. zarlino is essentially an mv3 variation on diatonic made by stacking alternating major and minor thirds. apparently you can instead use two different sizes of neutral third (the example i saw was in 311edo) and preserve the same structure with much more out-there sound. pretty cool!
- porcupine | porcusmine. the second-best heptatonic scale in the 5-limit, with a sequence of neighboring traditional triads you can walk up or down; you can add an extra triad to the staircase if you extend the scale by an extra note (while able to keep the mos property[!]). porcusmine is an 8-note mv3 variation on this which i discovered; see it documented here! i'm actually working on an album in 34edo's juster tuning of porcusmine and having a great time with it. the astute may notice that 34 is twice 17; i really like that slightly sharp 3/2.
- semaphore | diasem. haven't done as much with this, but pretty cool scale pair: still good for the quartal & quintal harmony while bringing in (especially in diasem) the stil xen but palatable seventh harmonic. diasem is also the first scale i've mentioned here to include comma steps, which can be fun!
maybe this will help someone else avoid the soul searching voyage of discovery i went on. then again soul searching voyages of discovery are sometimes the right call, especially if you are some kind of protagonist, in which case they just turn into montages - much easier to deal with.
i wrote this at 2am and should probably sleep now lol. btw i have not managed to do anything with that 4/3-repeating marvel scale but i still think that it is cool