Preface to the Xenome Diaries

On preparing for an epic musical quest

I feel a little like Bilbo Baggins at the moment, preparing myself to finally embark on a journey that I’ve been working towards my whole life. At 52, I’ve lived a lot of life already. I’ve made a lot of music, releasing a total of 134 albums so far, which is many more than most artists can conceive of. Beyond that, I’ve been in numerous bands, playing for months or years without recording any music at all.

Yet, somehow, I’ve found myself at the very beginning. I’ve played around with a lot of ideas and dipped my toes into the pools of possibility, but I’ve perpetually put off the impossible journey that began to stir in the back of my mind decades ago. And now the time has come to shoulder my pack and hit the road.

I’ve taught dozens of aspiring guitar players (and one aspiring sitar player), and touched many more musicians through my label, magazine, and books. But I’ve been holding my prized treasure somewhat close to the chest, not so much keeping a secret as sitting in a dark corner, whispering apparent gibberish to myself. With this book, I hope to finally spread the treasure map upon the table and invite those who’d dare to accompany me on this most glorious endeavor.

A bit of history

This is something I’ve been meaning to get out into the world since I started working on it almost 2 decades ago. I had always planned to write a book or build an app, but there is so much ground to cover that it was hard to know where to begin. More than anything, I wanted to avoid simply writing another encyclopedia of scales, a vast reference book that would entice readers with enormous possibility and then bore them to tears with page after page of structured charts and formulas. I know, because I’ve bought several of them that are tucked away in a box in the attic.

And to be honest, part of the delay has been that the prospect of grinding through 2048 scales in search of bits of harmonic magic has seemed at times impossible and even undesirable. There are plenty of reasons not to undertake such a task. Western harmony has done just fine with a handful of modes and scales. Even the complex harmonic realm of jazz only requires learning a few dozen scales, and the majority of possible scales simply aren’t useful for making traditional western music.

Yet, the allure of “exotic” scales and expanded systems of harmony still calls. Hearing an uncommon combination of notes wakes up the ear, like a secret language that’s just beyond comprehension. In a world where so much music sounds so much the same, and AI threatens to do more of the same faster and better, it seems high time us human musicians started exploring uncharted harmonic territory and staking our claim on undiscovered melodies.

A call to adventure

Join me, brave traveller, as I embark on this epic quest. Whether you prefer to sit back and watch me do all the dirty work, or you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and give it a go yourself, I’m happy to have companions for the long road ahead.

My goal is to explore every possible scale that can be formed from twelve notes, to discover the unique harmonic and melodic possibilities within, and to share the results with you in an artful way. With over 2000 points of interest on our journey, this is indeed the most epic of musical journeys. If I were to post a chapter every day (which I won’t even pretend is the goal), this would take over five and a half years to complete. It will likely take a bit longer than that.

I’ll be posting enough info on each scale to hopefully inspire you, my trusted companions, to try them for yourself. If you chose to do so, please use the comments section of each chapter to share your results.

Gearing up

My main tools for exploration are my iPad Pro, my 7-string Strandberg guitar, and my collection of pedals. I have developed my own guitar tuning (dubbed the skip-4 variation of All Major 3rds / M3 tuning by my friend Brian Berge, but I call it Xenotuning) based around the C/E/G# augmented triad to help streamline the process of finding each scale on the fretboard. And of course, I’ll be posting chapters in this section as they’re completed.

I’ve developed a workflow for producing music on iOS that allows me to generate ideas and get to recording fairly quickly. I’ll continue covering the technical details of my ever-evolving tools and techniques as things progress.

Xenomes - the map for our journey

Xenomes are a rich-coded naming system that I developed for musical scales, or more specifically, 12-TET pitch class sets (which can be intervals, chords, or scales). A “xenome” is the name or designator used to specify any given scale or pitch class set. Xenomes are the DNA of the magical, musical creatures that we’ll meet on our journey, and the map for getting there and back again.

When I started getting deep into music theory and particularly modal theory, I was quickly perturbed by the lack of a clear, universal naming system for musical scales. The common names (major, Mixolydian, enigmatic, etc) are arbitrary and tell you nothing about the scale really, while many common scales have multiple names, and most possible scales have no common names at all.

There are a couple of systems out there for cataloging 12-TET pitch class sets (e.g. Forte numbers), but the scale designators are mostly reference numbers to a defined catalog. My solution is more “rich-coded”, in that the scale designator (or “xenome” as I’ve come to call them), tells you which notes are in the scale without need for an external reference, and similarly the xenome for a given set of notes can be determined quickly without needing to search through encyclopedia indexes.

The genesis of this system came from applying the concept of hexadecimal color notation to musical pitch sets. The color white, for example, can be represented by the 6-digit string #FFFFFF. The string is actually made up of 3 bytes (FF FF FF), which are each hexadecimal representations of the RGB values in the range of 0–255 used to digitally create the color, which for white is (255, 255, 255).

As a guitarist, when I started getting into less common scales and modes, it made sense to represent them in a binary format and map them to the fretboard using one finger per fret across 3 strings. The binary representation of a scale formula basically uses a 1 where a note is present and a 0 where it is not. So the major scale split into 4-bit nibbles would look like 1010 1101 0101. This system is great because it is rich-coded and each scale has one and only one way to represent it, but it’s a little unwieldy, especially in communication with other musicians.

However, if you convert each of those 4 bit clusters into hexadecimal (e.g. AD5 for major), you suddenly get something that is simple to remember and easy to communicate, while still being rich-coded and strictly one-to one. This was a major Eureka moment for me, and I’ve used it daily ever since.

Practice

The real genius of this system comes from the simplicity of converting binary to hexadecimal and vice versa, combined with the ease of mapping binary scale representation to most instruments, especially those with fretboards or keyboards. While the math bits may take a bit of practice for beginners, it’s immediately quicker and more accessible than searching through a scale reference, and much more scalable than trying to memorize formulas for arbitrarily named scales.

This system obviously doesn’t replace other systems or sources of information. Rather, the purpose is to provide a universal method of uniquely identifying and communicating about all possible 12-TET scales in a way that can augment and compliment existing sources.

Extreme Basics

The simplest pitch class set contains only one note, the tonic, and is represented as:

Binary: 1000 0000 0000

Hexadecimal (xenome): 800

To convert a binary nibble to hexadecimal, at least in the beginning, you’ll need to convert to decimal first. Eventually, you’ll memorize them, as there’s only 16 possible nibbles. In converting to decimal, it’s important to know that each digit represents a multiple of 2, except for the rightmost digit, which represents 1. So from left to right, 8 4 2 1.

Thus, in the example above, the first binary nibble (1000) equates to (8*1)+(4*0)+(2*0)+(1*0) = 8+0+0+0 = 8 in decimal.

Hexadecimal digits range in value from 0 to 15, with everything above 9 represented using letters of the alphabet A through F.

As a handy reference, here are all the conversions for binary nibbles to hexadecimal:

0000 = 0

0001 = 1

0010 = 2

0011 = 3

0100 = 4

0101 = 5

0110 = 6

0111 = 7

1000 = 8

1001 = 9

1010 = A

1011 = B

1100 = C

1101 = D

1110 = E

1111 = F

Again, after a bit of practice, these are easy to memorize and conversion becomes unnecessary.

Determining the Xenome for a Scale

As an easy example, we’ll use the natural minor scale. For illustration, we’ll use A minor, which is the relative minor of C Major, and thus contains the notes A,B,C,D,E, F, and G.

The binary representation for the scale based on the notes preset would be 1011 0101 1010 (AxBC xDxE FxGx).

1011 = (8*1)+(4*0)+(2*1)+(1*1) = 8+2+1 = 11 decimal, or B in hex

0101 = (8*0)+(4*1)+(2*0)+(1*1) = 4+1 = 5 in decimal and hex

1010 = (8*1)+(4*0)+(2*1)+(1*0) = 8+2 = 10 in decimal or A in hex

Therefore, the xenome for the natural minor scale would be B5A. A Natural Minor could be represented as A-B5A.

Time to go

My hope is to complete this journey before I no longer can, so we better get going. Thanks for joining me on this quest.