Pentatonic (was Octave and Fifth Quantizer)

[Thomas Hudson]

"J. Larry Hendry" wrote:
> Guitar players know the pentatonic scales well.  It allows them to be
> somewhat musical in leads without really know where it is going.  

Larry, you're being too nice to us guitar players :-). "It allows
them to be somewhat musical" without really knowing what they're
doing.

A favorite pentatonic of guitarists is the "blues" scale.
In C:

C D# F(F#) G A#

The F# is sort of a ghost used in passing or bending. Combine this
with any I,IV, V progression, and play until everyone is bored.

A nice sort of eastern sounding scale can be had by only playing
the black keys. With my somewhat lacking keyboard skills I sometimes
retune my synth so that I can hit any black key and sound okay.
Try this with different modes, i.e. different black keys as the tonic.
Transposing to C:

C D F G A 

On the subject of quantizers, one idea I had was using two 
in series. The first would quanitize to octaves. The output 
of this quanitizer would be subtracted from the input voltage
and applied to the second which would quanitize to individual
notes within the octave. Then you could have switches to select
notes in every octave, and could then sum them and control scales
over the entire range. Does this make sense?

Thomas