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Scales where dyads are great but the triads are horrific

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

3/20/2011 5:12:44 PM

MikeB>"In contrast, many scales posted here are ones in which many of the dyads are fantastic, and yet all of the triads suck."

   Interesting, so in what scales would that be true?

   Compositionally, I find it hard to find scales that have strong "standard" triads (IE 9-odd limit or lower) that don't have very few total chords available as a result. One of the very few exceptions to this seems to be traditional scales like 1/4 comma mean-tone, which has both strong dyads and triads. Mohajira and other scale systems seem to fail at this as so many of their triads are much higher odd-limit (I would still consider them good triads...but many others likely wouldn't...).

  I also find that so long as the dyads are good and you consider more like 27-odd-limit fine for chords...you can most often get lots of "good" chords from most any scale with lots of good dyads.
  Although occasionally (ALA with 14TET)....the dyads almost all stink and yet they work with each other to form some amazingly good triads...although admittedly not a huge number of them (personally I find composing in 14TET or 13TET using triads to be a rather challenging task...though a very interesting one).

But if there's a way to get strong triads without having a much lower number of chords usable that is not very closely related to 1/4 comma meantone...I'm all for it!!