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351 Shapes
ABOUT THIS BOOK:
What you have here is a list of musical scales. You can find any collection of notes from 1 to 12 tones somewhere in it. The format is made to be a practical reference or journal. I've been working on it for a while now, trying to make a sourcebook for my own work thatʼs orderly and useful. None of the data in here is new to the world, but the delivery system is something I've designed to be simple and intuitive.
Numbers: There are 351 shapes in the book. This isn't arbitrary - it's what you get when you find all of the unique note formations that are possible with 12 tones (2048) and then group them into families of modes from the same scale. You can arrive at a lower numbers of basic structures if you say that mirror images are sonically equivalent. But if you hear a major and minor triad as qualitatively different, then 351 is the number for you. To make navigation easier, the colors of each page change every 9 days, working through a spectrum of 39 hues.
Why a calendar: There's potentially a huge amount of material to wade through in this type of project. You could write out every scale on a staff with every transposition, the names itʼs known by in various musical traditions, the way it connects to similar scales, examples from musical repertoire, all kinds of stuff. And this has been done in heavy books and endless tables of data. As someone who is easily confused, my goal here is to make the thing as streamlined as possible, with clean pages that don't distract with a bunch of clutter and redundancies. I've always enjoyed the challenge of presenting complex ideas in plain language and minimalist design, and have always been vexed by theory books that require the reader to know a bunch of special jargon and obscure references. Music theory doesn't have to be a private club. So in this book, musical shapes progress in a basic format that everyone recognizes (a calendar) with daily melodic prompts, each one different from those before. There are no rules or agenda - the main goal is to provide the reader an inclusive point to entry to discover raw melodic materials for creative practice.
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By Miles OkazakiABOUT THIS BOOK:
What you have here is a list of musical scales. You can find any collection of notes from 1 to 12 tones somewhere in it. The format is made to be a practical reference or journal. I've been working on it for a while now, trying to make a sourcebook for my own work thatʼs orderly and useful. None of the data in here is new to the world, but the delivery system is something I've designed to be simple and intuitive.
Numbers: There are 351 shapes in the book. This isn't arbitrary - it's what you get when you find all of the unique note formations that are possible with 12 tones (2048) and then group them into families of modes from the same scale. You can arrive at a lower numbers of basic structures if you say that mirror images are sonically equivalent. But if you hear a major and minor triad as qualitatively different, then 351 is the number for you. To make navigation easier, the colors of each page change every 9 days, working through a spectrum of 39 hues.
Why a calendar: There's potentially a huge amount of material to wade through in this type of project. You could write out every scale on a staff with every transposition, the names itʼs known by in various musical traditions, the way it connects to similar scales, examples from musical repertoire, all kinds of stuff. And this has been done in heavy books and endless tables of data. As someone who is easily confused, my goal here is to make the thing as streamlined as possible, with clean pages that don't distract with a bunch of clutter and redundancies. I've always enjoyed the challenge of presenting complex ideas in plain language and minimalist design, and have always been vexed by theory books that require the reader to know a bunch of special jargon and obscure references. Music theory doesn't have to be a private club. So in this book, musical shapes progress in a basic format that everyone recognizes (a calendar) with daily melodic prompts, each one different from those before. There are no rules or agenda - the main goal is to provide the reader an inclusive point to entry to discover raw melodic materials for creative practice.