Aloha,

Where would I find examples of Arabian, East Indian, Asian and African scales?

Thank you in advance for any help on the subject.

Peace,

Dean

A great resource is Yusef Lateef's "Repository of scales and melodic patterns". Yusef is of course the brilliant jazz saxophonist/flutist. It's a big and sometimes bewildering book but you will have a lot to chew on for a few years or a lifetime. It's out of print. I found a copy recently at a music store in NYC.

Nicholas Slominsky's "Thesaurus of scales and melodic patterns" is a similar work. Coltrane and some of the other jazz guys referenced it, although it was written for the classical world.

Amazon has it. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/082561449X/qid=1142982926/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-5520020-7015328?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

You got me thinking and I found these:

http://sound.jp/scale_viewer/asia2.html

http://www.lucaspickford.com/ragas.htm

I'm sure you could find more if you google such terms as "asian scales" "indian scales" etc.

If you really want to get into different scales from around the world, you'll have to have way to deal with micro-tuning. If you have a fretless bass that will do just fine. Sometime synthesizers have different temperments programed. If you don't know what this is, look into "Just Tone Tuning" and "Even Tone Tuning". Its a wild world, good luck.

I might reccomend the "Bass Grimoire."

It covers a lot of ground and isn't as much of a mental overload as Slominsky can be.

Bass Grimoire at Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0825821819/sr=8-1/qid=1142996533/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-2925360-1458237?%5Fencoding=UTF8)