Symmetric Scales
Scales built from one repeating step size. Because every note has the same weight, none of them sounds like home, and stopping anywhere feels equally unfinished. That is the effect these scales are for.
- 6 or 8 notes
- equal steps all the way
- none, and that is the point
which styles use it
- Film music
- Jazz
- Game music
- Twentieth century classical
How it is built
The whole tone scale takes six notes a whole step apart, which uses up the octave exactly. The diminished scale alternates whole and half steps for eight notes. Both patterns repeat before the octave is up, which means transposing them by their step size gives you the same scale again. There are only two whole tone scales and three diminished scales in total.
Weightless. The whole tone scale sounds dreamlike and slightly unreal. The diminished scale sounds tense and mechanical, and it fits over dominant chords far better than it has any right to.
Where to use it
In film and game music, wherever something needs to float or feel wrong. Over augmented chords, which come from the whole tone scale. Over dominant seventh chords with altered notes, where the diminished scale supplies most of them.
The chords that go with it
The whole tone scale contains only augmented triads and dominant chords with a raised fifth. The diminished scale contains four diminished seventh chords, which is why one diminished seventh can lead to so many places.
What it gets confused with
With each other, and with chromatic playing. All three sound unmoored, but the diminished scale still has a pull and the whole tone scale genuinely does not.