Non-Western Scales and Chord Progressions

I'm looking for any Non-Western (Middle Eastern, Indian, East Asian... whatever) scales and chord progressions for the uke. The chord progressions are the same for any instrument, and can be googled, but I thought I would give it a shot here to see if any of you old school ukers have any uke specific beta on this.

It would be nice to see a collection of this stuff in one thread that is easy to find when we search.

I did a search and came up with a few scattered bits of info. I may have been searching for the wrong key words, but this is the best thing I have found so far...

http://www.ukuleleunderground.com/forum/showthread.php?11861-Middle-Eastern-Scale

A couple other posts were just variations of this.

I also found this... http://www.maqamworld.com/

there aren't really any "eastern scales". Most Eastern European music is based on basic major scales, melodic and harmonic minors (and their modes). I play in a balkan band and a klezmer band and it's rare that we play anything far off these. Good luck!

The problem you're going to encounter with non-Western scales is that many musical traditions have tones you're just not going to get on the ukulele, which has an octave divided into 12 half-steps. A lot of Middle Eastern music, for example, has "quarter tones" between the half tones, which are fundamental to playing many scales correctly.

Oddly enough, really old-school Swedish traditional music has a similar "neutral third", that is, in the D scale you have a note in between F and F# rather than either of those notes. Apparently neutral thirds were also used in some really old American Old Time and Blues music.

That said, there are quite a few Arabic maqam that happen to align with Western the half-step octave, so those might be worth exploring. A good place to start is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_maqam

Here's one of the few examples of Arabic music on a uke that I know of, filmed by myself back in 2004 in Iraq: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdc4BbY7rpE


One more thing to note: a lot of other musical traditions aren't heavy on chords, being more melodically-based. In some cases you can overlay normal Western chords over them, in the right progression, but in others they really only work melodically.

So not at all to frustrate you, but there are a lot of factors to take into consideration outside of modern Western music. One interesting way to start expanding your understanding of modes/scales is to start exploring some of the less common Modern Western modes first: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_mode#Modern

One of the easier ways to back up a mode is by droning, so you might consider using your low G string as a drone, and playing, say a Phyrgian G scale above it, letting the drone harmonise in the background.

Long reply, but hope it gives you a few ideas.

Pentatonic scales are pretty common in Japanese music (as well as other Asian music, according to Wikipedia, but I'm only familiar with Japanese).

I really like the Hijaz-Nahawand scale for a middle eastern vibe. One version includes a microtone, but the other suits fretted instruments just fine. You can find it at
http://www.maqamworld.com/maqamat/hijaz.html
Other scales that will give your playing a Japanese flavor are hira-joshi and kumoi-joshi:
http://www.shredaholic.com/user48.html
Also worth playing around with is the whole tone scale, which is found in some Indonesian gamelan music. In C that would be C-D-E-F#-G#-A#(Bb)-C, no half steps.

Been playing the Mandolin a bit lately and these scales sound amazing on it. Don't worry, I still love my ukes though!

There are a lot of exotic-sounding scales that you can play on any standard tuned instrument. There's a couple of tricks to finding them. The simplest is to pick a chord and corresponding scale that isn't considered 'stable' in western music, i.e. a dominant or diminished chord, and never move away from that chord. This is particularly powerful with the dominant chord of the harmonic minor scale. The familiar major and minor keys tend to steal the spotlight just by their very nature, but if you never leave your dominant chord, they don't get the chance.

Second, removing notes from a scale can add a sense of the exotic by drawing out different intervals that are already hidden in familiar scales. Reducing a seven-note scale to a five-note scale seems to work like magic, especially if you use scale degrees 1,2,3,5 and 6, or 1,3,4,5, and 7. I charted out a whole series of pentatonic modes based on this, and it's still one of my favorite ways of generating melody ideas.