13/10/2017 Barry Harris's Sixth Diminished Scale | Cochrane Music

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Barry Harris's Sixth Diminished Scale Contact

Here's a great excerpt from a Barry Harris workshop where he introduces an interesting diminished concept, which he Mail me

(jokingly) calls his "personal scale". It produces a very cool jazz sound by a quite unexpected means. The video is a bit piano- Lessons RSS Feed
focussed so I thought it might help some guitar players to have a summary from our point of view of the main idea. Twitter

Here's the video:

Big Picture
6th dim scale (long excerpt)
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Chords

The scale is in fact just a major scale with an added b6 or #5, so it's spelled like this:
Learning the Maj 7 b5
and Maj 7 #5 Arpeggios
"Star Eyes" Harmonic
1 2 3 4 5 b6 6 7
Major Reharm
C D E F G G# A B
"Have You Met Miss Jones"
Reharm

More exotically, you could think of this as Harmonic Major with an added natural 6. You may think this is perverse, since the "What Is This Thing
other way is clearly simpler, but in fact that b6 contributes a very strong Harmonic Major sound. You can find full guitar Called Love" Simple
fingerings for this scale on page 298 of the current version of Scale and Arpeggio Resources -- if it's not there, search for the Reharm
interval map "t, t, s, t, s, s, t, s" and you'll find it. Scale-Covering Seventh
Pairs
However, he explains it in a quite different way, noticing that a cover of the scale is given by the C6 and Bdim7 arpeggios
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C E G A + B D F G#
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This is what I call a "disjoint cover" because the two parts share no common notes. Adding a note to the major scale is quite
AmP and AlP
easy, of course, but it will tend to lead you to play in a scalar, stepwise way; this way of thinking encourages you to see the
underlying chord as the C6 arpeggio and the tension notes as the Bdim7, which is easy to find in relation to it. Some Quick MiP Combos
Yet More Scales from
You can, of course, use this on any Maj7 type of harmony as well as on chords explicitly written with a 6. So one way to think
Hungarian Altered
of this is "On a Maj7 type of chord, play the diminished arpeggio built on the 2, 4, #5 or 7.
Pentatonic
Being a pianist, though, Barry shows us a bit more when he moves to thinking of it in terms of chords. To start with, he points
Even More Scales from
out that it contains the dominant 7 chord of the relative minor as well as the major keys, which makes for strong chord
Hungarian Major
substitutions like E7-Am7 subbing for C6, and enables us to construct chord-scales like these (notice the different chord
Pentatonic
qualities that become available):
Even More Scales from
the Hungarian Minor
Pentatonic
C6 Dm7b5 Em7 FMaj7 G7 Abdim7 Am7 Bdim7 C6

C6 Dm7 Em7 FmMaj7 G7b9 Ab+ AmMaj7 Bm6 C6 Archive

Speculation

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13/10/2017 Barry Harris's Sixth Diminished Scale | Cochrane Music
He also very quickly moves on to another, related scale obtained by flattening the third of the scale:
"Days of Wine and Roses"
Variation
David Stern's 12-Tone
1 2 b3 4 5 b6 6 7
Patterns
C D Eb F G G# A B
Modulation Staging
Building Vocabulary with
This time we can think of this as a Melodic Minor with an added #5 or b6, or as a Harmonic Minor with an added natural 6. Seventh Arpeggios
Again we have an alternative perspective provided by a disjoint cover: the m6 arpeggio plus the same dim7 we used before.
New Sounds from
So this rule suggests that we can use this dim7 superimposition idea over minor chords as well as major! You can find full
"Roomy" Pentatonics
guitar fingerings for this scale on page 298 of the current version of Scale and Arpeggio Resources -- if it's not there, search
for the interval map "t, s, t, t, s, s, t, s" and you'll find it. Archive

There's a bit more in the video about using chords borrowed from these scales, but the specific voicings are quite pianistic --
listen, play along and see if you can devise your own chord sub ideas using these scales, as well as using them for melodic
Rants
interest in your solos.

[UPDATE: After posting this I was tipped off to Alan Kingstone's great book applying many of Harris's ideas to guitar. It's really Do you Know that Scale?
good.] CAGED Considered
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For Failing To Learn
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Scales

Making Exotic Scales with

Familiar Arpeggios
Barry Harris's Sixth
Diminished Scale
Root notes are for wimps:
An invitation to
hypermodes
The Maj7b5 Arpeggio
Some Dissonant Scales
for Minor Chords

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