Whole Tone Scale?

[Dulcetjones]

I'm not sure if this is a real scale or not but a fellow guitarist I jam with sometimes brought this to us while we had a drummer, bass player and the two of us on guitar. We are all pretty much rock/blues players with a nod to some more progressive stuff but not jazz. He got us to all start playing on an "A" natural note and then play only whole tones from there, no semi-tones, not even minor 3rd's. So, the drummer got a beat going and away we went. After several minutes we brought it to an end and we all had the same opinions on what just happened. One was that it didn't sound terribly off, it actually was a valid musical sounding thing. Second, we all agreed it sounded like what our idea of some jazz sounds like, and lastly, we all agreed we didn't want to do it again.

[MRLEON83]

Yes it's a strange scale, you can imagine a genie popping out of a lamp ... that sort of sound?

[mattf77]

It's also used in the fast descending run in The Simpsons theme tune.
Good to throw in to music once in a while

[Koss59]

Listen to the intro of Stevie Wonder's "You are the sunshine of my life"

[uncle_psychosis]

Yep, its a "real scale"---used a lot by the likes of Debussy.

Interestingly enough, there are only two whole tone scales, so even us guitarists should be able to learn them

[musophilr]

There's a nice use of it in Eruption (Focus, side 2 of Moving Waves), where Jan Akkerman goes down then up as Thijs van Leer goes up then down.

[SevenSharpNine]

From what I understand, most musicians will use the whole tone scale sparingly, and not for an entire song as your band did. However, for an example of some extensive use of the whole tone scale, you should check out "Red" by Kind Crimson. Sounds pretty cool if you ask me.

[frankus]

It's not a scale in the traditional sense because all the notes have an equal weighting (why there's only two scales).

Where's the 5th? the 3rd? It doesn't really have them.

Next thing to explore is does it make any difference if you use the whole tone approach starting from the root note or a semitone off the root note?

My favourites for using it are Primus on Tommy was a Race-car Driver. Also Zappa uses it a fair bit for parts of Shut Up n Play....

[clarky]

From what I understand, most musicians will use the whole tone scale sparingly, and not for an entire song as your band did. However, for an example of some extensive use of the whole tone scale, you should check out "Red" by Kind Crimson. Sounds pretty cool if you ask me.

awesome song

[Viz]

The end of the sax solo in Aaron Neville's Yellow Moon