Bruce Arnold

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The best way to start this course is to pick an octatonic scale and learn it on your instrument. Sing it over a drone, and explore the chord voicings for the scale. The symmetrical diminished or diminished scale will of course be on of the first scales students work on because it is so prevalent in contemporary music. It will give you a sense of improvement quickly, and that will encourage you to take things further.

On the first few pages I’ve presented a lot of ways you could approach this course and a series of lists that can help explore eight note scales and the chords that can be used with them.

This course looks at 495 octatonic scales, their internal structure, which chords they can be played over and much more information to help you organize your study. These 495 possible eight note scales can be reduced down the 29 prime forms using pitch class set theory that can be helpful when you are organizing how these octatonic scales interrelate. I’ve include references to these throughout this course. The pitch class set theory information is by no means crucial to working with this course but over time you will see its usefulness. If you want to learn more about pitch class set theory and how it can be used by an improvising musician I recommend the “Sonic Resource Guide.”

Included in this course is a list of compositions by various composers who have used octatonic scales. I highly recommend listening to this music to give you ideas and inspiration. You should also check out the music and improvisations of guitarist Alan Holdsworth. His use of octatonic scales in his compositions and improvisations is one of the reasons his music sounds so unique.

This course also contains a list of the two tetrad (4 note) chords that form the complete eight note scale. This list shows the Two Tetrad combinations for the 29 possible pitch class sets. This list comes from the “Sonic Resource Guide” which I highly recommend if you want to dig deeper into all scales. The Two Tetrad list can be used to find two four note structures that contain all the notes of an eight note scale. In any case these chord structures will help to give you the “octatonic sound” and get past some of the common pitfalls.

It’s also important to do some ear training with these segmented Bebop Scales. My teachers had me play but also sing these segmented Bebop scales with approaches all in one key. So for instance, if you were playing these over “Donna Lee” you would sing all the segmented scales in the key of Ab. This will not be easy for most musicians but will really ingrain the information and help improve your key retention.

Table of Contents:

Composers and Musicians that have used Octatonic Scales
495 Eight Note Scales
How to Work with this Course
“Derivative” Composition
Chords and Available Tensions
Ways to Implement Diatonic Octatonic Chords
495 Eight Note Scales with Prime Form
Diatonic Chords of Eight Note Scales
Diatonic Chords of the Key of C
Conclusion

List of Contents for 495 Eight Note Scales Course: