Double Harmonic and Gypsy Scales
Scales with two wide steps instead of one, which gives them a sound almost everyone recognises and almost nobody can name. They also carry the messiest naming in music theory, so this page uses the neutral names and explains the rest.
- 7 notes
- 1 b2 3 4 5 b6 7
- two augmented seconds
which styles use it
- Film music
- Metal
- Prog
- Game music
How it is built
The double harmonic scale is the major scale with the second and sixth degrees flattened, which leaves two gaps of three semitones each. The Hungarian minor scale does something similar from a minor starting point, raising the fourth as well. Both are built around those wide steps, and that is what your ear picks up.
Dramatic and immediately evocative. Whether it sounds Middle Eastern, Eastern European or like a film score depends mostly on what you have heard before rather than on anything in the scale.
Where to use it
In film and game scoring, where the sound is used as shorthand for a place. In metal and prog, where the wide steps make good riffs. In the traditions these scales were taken from, where they are part of a much larger system that a seven note scale does not capture.
The chords that go with it
The chords built on these scales are unusual, with augmented and diminished shapes turning up in places a normal key never puts them. Most players use the scale melodically over a simple drone rather than harmonising it.
What it gets confused with
With harmonic minor, which has one wide step rather than two. The second wide step is what separates this family from it.
Keep going
Everything in scales
- Harmonic Major
- Modes of Melodic Minor
- Bebop Scales
- Symmetric Scales
- Double Harmonic and Gypsy Scales
- The Chromatic Scale
- Non-Western Tone Systems