UNIVERSAL

SCALE FORMS FOR GUITAR FROM INDIAN CLASSICAL MUSIC

Robert Schneider

Dedicated to Tanner Olin Smith

Listening to music from the 1960s and ‘70s, it seems like guitar and keyboard players had
access to some very exotic musical scales, sort of at the intersection of scales from folk music,
jazz, Indian music, blues and other forms—and informed by lysergic vision quests, no doubt.
Like check out solos from the Byrds or Strawberry Alarm Clock or Piper at the Gates of Dawn,
or for instance the electric sitar and organ solos on “Do It Again” by Steely Dan. Those are
crazy scales and I have no idea what the soloists are doing; it feels really mysterious like lost
ancient knowledge. Looking in a similar direction, I offer here a method to build new musical
scales on guitar, based on ideas from Hindustani (i.e. North Indian) classical music theory.

The Western tradition of classical/folk/popular music mainly uses the major and minor
scales, along with a few less common scales like harmonic minor. By contrast, Hindustani
classical music uses 10 equally prominent scales, which include the Western major and
minor scales (but not harmonic minor). These 7-tone Indian scales (same number of tones
per octave as Western scales) are called Thaat (sounds like “tot”), and are constructed by a
special rule about how you flatten or sharpen tones. You begin with a major scale in any key,
and alter certain tones to form new scales. Of the seven tones in the major scale octave, the
root note and fifth are never altered, they are fixed tones. The second, third, sixth and seventh
tones in the octave can be “flatted” (or not) but never raised. The fourth tone in the scale can
be “sharped” (or not) but never lowered. The 10 classical Thaat arise from this construction.

An easy calculation gives a total of 2b = 32 different scales that can be built by this method.
These include all the classical Indian and Western cases (including the harmonic minor
scale), plus twenty or so other, new scales. The left-hand diagram below represents the
guitar fretboard at any point on the neck, and can be used to map out these scales by filling
in certain dots. The black and boldface-white circles represent the root and fifth tones,
respectively, which are part of every scale. For the rest of the dots inside the oval blobs, one
of each pair is selected for the scale. The second, color diagram gives a key to the way octaves
repeat: oval blobs of the same color (note there are two different shades of blue) represent
different octaves or fingerings of the same note, so blobs of the same color should have the
same choices (first or second) of dots included in the scale... or you can just mark dots off
however you like and not worry about different octaves having the same sequence of notes.

So you can build lots of interesting scales using this universal template, and experiment with
them on guitar—of course, the scale construction principles apply to any instrument. As
examples of what these diagrams look like, here are the ten traditional Thaat and an
additional one constructed by the same rules, plus a few blank diagrams for new scales:

Notice that Bilaval Thaat is the Western major scale, Kafi Thaat is the minor scale and New
Thaat #1 is the harmonic minor. I should emphasize, I’m not an expert on Hindustani music
theory—I just love the beautiful music of India, and used combinatorics to work out
additional scales from the little theory I do know. I learned about the classical Thaat in a few
music lessons with Raj Pandya, a renowned Indian musician and teacher based in Kentucky.
Mr. Pandya greatly expanded my understanding of music: in the first lesson, he spoke of the
universe as an energy field rippling with life and creativity, and related this to sound waves.

If you are interested to learn more, there are many good resources on Hindustani music out
there; for instance, check out The Raga Guide CD and book set (Nimbus Records, 1999).