Musterion/Hungarian Minor

Earlier today, I listened to the Podcast preview of Joe Satriani’s upcoming album (LISTEN here or WATCH the clips).

The opening track is going to be called “Musterion”, and has quite an interesting story behind it. Harmonically, its based on the hungarian minor scale, and you can hear a tiny bit of the song in the podcast… pretty cool sounding, yet quite wacky.
I had my guitar in hand, so I figured out a rough version of the two chords he is playing there (which, obviously, are also based on the hungarian minor scale). I remember that at GIT, we learned a bunch of those rather exotic or unusual scales… it was quite interesting, and I occasionally sit down and experiment with some of them (I use some of them in my playing too), so this was a bit like that.
In the TAB below you can see those two chords (I think I came rather close), and above that, a 3NPS-pattern of the hungarian minor scale in C (C D Eb F# G Ab B). By the way, the scale also is known as Double Harmonic Minor or Harmonic Minor #4 (if you analyze it, it’s a harmonic minor scale with a raised fourth)

If you’re interested, create your own little jam-track based on those chords (or other chords derived from that scale, like: Cm – D7b5 – Eb+ – G – Ab7 – Bm6) and try to improvise over it. It might be odd at first if you haven’t played with scales like that before (I remember how alienated I was at first back then), but it can be a very liberating, interesting experience, which might even cause new soloing- or song-ideas. Even if you only know one pattern of the scale, you can already figure out some of the melodic and harmonic possibilities, and you can try the same thing with other scales of course.
So, try it out!

Some chords derived from the scale, in case you want to experiment with other chord progressions… try it!

Update: I tabbed out some of the licks/repeating patterns I came up with while I was jamming over that chord progression. Some of them can be used as “shred licks” too. It might be interesting to use stuff like this in a pitch axis type way (again, kudos to Satch), by i.e. playing them over a static bass tone, switching between different scales.

Example: have the bass play a static C note, and then alternate i.e. between C minor licks and C hungarian minor licks like the ones in the TAB, or, for a smoother transition, C minor – C harmonic minor – C hungarian minor.

The licks (click to enlarge):

Of course all this doesn’t mean you have to write songs in hungarian minor exclusively now. Maybe the scale does nothing for you… if so, you don’t have to play it. But maybe, you can weave it into your improvisations or create a riff or melody based on it… you won’t have to dive into complicated theoretical analysis for that.

Hope this was of interest for some of you!

PS: Can’t wait to hear the whole album, and I love the idea behind those preview-podcasts!