What and Why Triad Pairs?
Harmonising hexatonic scales into a triad pairs provides a fantastic concept for expanding on knowledge of triads and diatonic harmony and find new and intriguing ways of exploring the fretboard. They’re a particularly useful tool for improving triad technique as the patterns are essentially the same as their three-note triad counterparts.
Creating Triad Pairs
To derive the pair of triads from a hexatonic scale, we separate adjacent notes into their opposite chord. Perhaps thinking of grouping the notes as “every other note” is a more effective explanation. The Key above the diagram but underneath the title identifies the relationships between the colours.
Harmonising Diatonic Hexatonic Scales Into Triad Pairs
Diatonic triad pairs provide a really interesting approach to organise more complicated six note tertian chords. The fretboard diagram shows the notes of a Gm11 harmonised into G minor and F major triad chords.
The video below demonstrates these concepts in more detail.
Non-Diatonic Triad Pairs
Not all hexatonic scales are diatonic. Using the term Triad-Pair to describe all pairs of three-note chords creates some contradictions and strange theoretical edge-cases. Intriguingly, the examples below show that the Dsus2 and Asus4 contain the same notes. Enharmonic is the term used to define this characteristic.
Perhaps one of the more well known hexatonic scales are the Major and relative minor blues scales (another enharmonic relationship). In these instances, due to their use of chromatic notes, when harmonised into triad-pairs it creates peculiar sounding harmonisations. As shown in the diagrams below, neither of the two triads directly refer to the defined Major or minor key centre in the title name.
Custom Setting For Harmonising Hexatonic Scales
The example above shows some limitations to harmonising hexatonic scales into “triad-pairs“. It’s a good use-case for custom colour-coded harmonisations.
Simply dragging between two circles on the same string will cycle order of the colours. This feature enables users to quickly experiment to find alternative harmonisation methods. Fretharmony does include other harmonise pre-sets for Hexatonic scales, but that discussion is for a future post. The example below shows an intriguing harmonisation of the A minor blues scale.
General Practice Guidelines
Although fretboard diagrams can be useful for learning new things or for reference there are some significant but subtle disadvantages when practicing using illustrative diagrams. The video below offers advice regarding how to avoid potential pitfalls. These guidelines could be applied to any use of diagrams generated by Fretharmony but there may be occasions to bend the rules.