The Mohammedan Scale

by Jason Earls, author of How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell & Red Zen

This will be a quick and easy article. We will only be dealing with only one scale, the Mohammedan Scale (which is almost a finger exercise in itself) along with a couple of additional finger exercises built from it.

As you can probably guess from the title, the Mohammedan Scale is used extensively in traditional Middle Eastern songs (of which I can’t say I’m familiar with even one), but I do love Eastern sounding scales, since most of them possess a particularly dark and somewhat eerie quality. Also they can be quite challenging to play since many of them have wide intervals interspersed with half steps. Here is the Mohammedan Scale in the key of A:

-----------------------------5-7-8-10--
-----------------------5-6-9-----------
-------------------5-7-----------------
-------------6-7-9---------------------
-------5-7-8---------------------------
-5-7-8---------------------------------

Listen to the overall dark tone of the scale. To me it seems very "emotional" sounding. Also notice the last four notes that occur on the high E string. If we assign one finger per note on that string, we can produce a nice, challenging finger exercise from that portion along. What I mean is, we can play the last four notes on the high E string using a 1-2-3-4 fingering combination (I’ll put the info below the tablature); and then to make the exercise cyclic we’ll use notes on the B string from the scale as well.

Try this making sure to pick every note:

(to see this article with tablature formatted correctly, go here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/8652244/The-Mohammedan-Scale )

-5-7-8-10-8-7-5-7-------------------
------------------5-6-9-10-9-6-5-6--
--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
1 2 3 4 3 2 1 2 1 2 4 4 4 2 1 2

The fingering here can be pretty tricky. Notice the information listed below the TAB. Again, you should use all four fingers for the notes on the high E string; and then for those on the B use all fingers EXCEPT your ring finger. That is, the three 4s in a row mean you should fret with your pinky and then slide up (with your pinky) to get the note on the 10th fret, then slide back down again and continue.

The exercise above uses notes directly from the Mohammedan scale, but now let’s generate another exercise using the same four note high E pattern on the B as well, being concerned only with working our fingers:

--5-7-8-10-8-7-5-7--------------------
--------------------5-7-8-10-8-7-5-7--
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------

Now that’s a real finger stretcher, isn’t it? Note that if the stretch is a little too wide for your hands, you can move it up the neck to frets that are not spaced so far apart.
The exercises above should help build your picking speed, increase finger coordination, finger strength and flexibility while improving your accuracy. Just make sure that your hands are sufficiently warmed up before attempting any of the exercises. And remember to use a metronome as well.

-end-

Jason Earls is author of the books How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Cocoon of Terror (Afterbirth Books), Red Zen, Heartless Bast*rd In Ecstasy, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); } and 0.136101521283655... all available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Yankee Pot Roast, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover’s books, Mathworld, Thirteen, Chiaroscuro, Dogmatika, Neometropolis, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG’s Speculative Fiction, AlienSkin, Escaping Elsewhere, Recreational and Educational Computing, Theatre of Decay, Nocturnal Ooze, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, and other publications. He currently resides in Oklahoma with his wife, Christine.