How to sound diatonic in Blackjack.

I had the impression from a discussion here that Blackjack was
incapable of much in the way of diatonic scale progressions and
traditional sounding harmony, so I ended up attempting to cure it of
a disease it didn't actually have. If you look under the hood using
Scala, you find two adjacent scale degrees which to within a few
cents allow a 1-5/4-4/3-3/2-5/3-15/8 scale, with neither the major
nor the minor tone available. However, we do have an excellent
supermajor tone, or 8/7, and an excellent subminor tone close to
12/11, so you get two adjacent, semi-diatonic scales within Blackjack.

--- In tuning@y..., genewardsmith@j... wrote:

> If you look under the hood using
> Scala, you find two adjacent scale degrees which to within a few
> cents allow a 1-5/4-4/3-3/2-5/3-15/8 scale, with neither the major
> nor the minor tone available.

I was previously aware of this for two reasons: 1. it's immediately
evident from the lattice; 2. Dave Keenan posted a list of _all_ the
scales in Scala that are subsets of Blackjack, with a maximum error
of 5¢.

--- In tuning@y..., "Paul Erlich" <paul@s...> wrote:

> I was previously aware of this for two reasons: 1. it's immediately
> evident from the lattice; 2. Dave Keenan posted a list of _all_ the
> scales in Scala that are subsets of Blackjack, with a maximum error
> of 5¢.

The conclusion is, however, that you can sound diatonic in Blackjack--
it's pretty easy to make nice with diatonic sounds if you avoid the
second degree, which even harmonically one can do since the
dominant/tonic cadence doesn't really need the second degree to make
its point.

I also think even with a second degree sharp by a sixth of a tone, it
sounds like a diatonic scale with the second degree out of tune, but
still recognizably diatonic in sound.

--- In tuning@y..., genewardsmith@j... wrote:

> The conclusion is, however, that you can sound diatonic in
Blackjack--
> it's pretty easy to make nice with diatonic sounds if you avoid the
> second degree, which even harmonically one can do since the
> dominant/tonic cadence doesn't really need the second degree to
make
> its point.

Yes, you can omit the fifth of the dominant chord, which is the
second degree of the scale.
>
> I also think even with a second degree sharp by a sixth of a tone,

And the interval between the second and sixth degrees now a quarter-
tone narrower than a conventional "fifth",

> it
> sounds like a diatonic scale with the second degree out of tune,
but
> still recognizably diatonic in sound.

Well, if anyone said you _can't_ sound diatonic in blackjack, they
meant with the second degree _in_ tune, and with the second and sixth
degrees forming a conventional fifth, which they clearly did in the
diatonic example that was supposedly in blackjack, but wasn't.