The fast talking doodling music theorist and musician 12tone visually and verbally challenged himself to create a truly unique working scale from random notes. While working through the notes and chords, 12Tone discovered a distinct lack of perfect fifths. Rather than trying to force perfect fifths, he sought inspiration from the harmonic minor scale and blues scale and instead turned to dyads (as intervals within the perfect fifth) to mimic the sound of the missing perfect fifth.
The scale …it’s only got three perfect fifths…most of our more stable chord qualities need that perfect fifth to hold them together. Which is why the major scale has a whopping six of them. But here we’ve got just half that which means we can’t build stable triads from most of the notes in our scale, including the root. This seems like a big problem and it is, but we can solve it with some help from one of chord Theory’s most overlooked tools – the dyad. This is like a triad except instead of using three notes we only use two so we can create harmony without needing a fifth at all.
