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I blipped this song yesterday and decided I should write a post about it… LOL! Anyway…

It was in my freshman college years when I bought Joe Satriani’s Not of This Earth, and in that album there’s this one particular track that always bothered me. It’s a very strange song (with a very strange melody) called “The Enigmatic”. Click on the YouTube link below if you’ve never heard it yet.

We will not analyze the song itself here, or discuss any of those trademark whiz-bang guitar techniques, but rather focus on the scale that inspired the song. If you think our Lydian-dominant lesson from last time was quirky, wait till you hear this one!

I can feel that Joe was trying to stretch the boundaries of conventional melody and harmony in this song. The melody is carried mainly by doublestops on an E pedal point, accented by some eerie arpeggios. And what makes it sound so strange is primarily the scale he used to build the entire song. This scale is known as the “enigmatic” scale, and was originally used (at least according to Wikipedia) in the late 1800s by the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi.

The enigmatic scale is actually an artificial or synthetic scale, being that it is not based on any of the traditional major, harmonic or melodic minor modes, and at the same time is also not rooted on any of the ancient, traditional or cultural intervals (such as the Byzantine, the bebop, or the various Japanese pentatonic scales). It is more an artificially-constructed scale built on an arbitrary interval of notes.

On C, the enigmatic scale is spelled C – D-flat – E – F# – G# – A# – B. Thus you would notice immediately that the scale lacks a dominant (the G-note) and subdominant (the F-note), and this is what primarily gives the scale its stinging character. Add to this the Phrygian-like flatted 2nd, which relative to the major 3rd, gives a wide interval of three semitones. And then add some more quirky elements like the Lydian-like raised 4th, and the raised 5th and 6th, and you’ve got one really twisted-sounding scale.

As originally used by Verdi in his “Ave Maria” of 1898, the scale ascends as is, but when descending, the raised 4th (i.e., F#) is replaced by the natural (F), which gives another three-semitone interval, this time relative to the raised 5th. In contrast to these wide intervals, there is a long four-note chromatic “section” too, which begins with the #6, going to the major 7th, and then the tonic, all the way to the minor 9th. It’s so enigmatic indeed!

Further analysis will lead you to think that the scale is somewhat a derivative of the “hexatonic” or whole-tone scale (again in C, spelled as C – D – E – F# – G# – A#), like a whole-tone scale with a major 2nd and missing a leading tone.

In a construction or soloing context, it would be difficult to think of anything traditional with the application of this scale, except for the fact that the raised dominant hints us of trying out this scale over an augmented chord progression. One different way of looking at C enigmatic is in the context of an E-major, C#-minor or an F#-major triad, but be careful about adding the chromatic notes that result when you use the scale like this. On the tonic, it is possible to use this scale over altered chords such as the major-flat-5th, the augmented-major-7th and the major-7-flat-5th.

Most of the time, I find it best to use the enigmatic scale as a substitute for an altered scale in a freer vamp setting. That is because the chromaticism that is introduced by the scale does not disturb anything in context.

I will try to come up with some audio examples when I get home, so please try to come back to this post in a few days.

Practice, persevere and conquer!