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That’s not true though, whole tones and tritones won’t cover the whole chromatic scale


Got me! You’re right.

Ok, gotta remove multiples of factors of twelve, so 2 (whole), 3 (dim), 4 (aug), 6 (tritone), 8 and 9 are out.

That leaves 1, 5, 7, 10, and 11, plus all the variants from adding n*12 (e.g. 13 or 25). So my bold assertion didn’t work out too well.


There’s some really interesting theory that stems from that relationship too.

For example, there are only three distinct diminished “loops”. These each define tonal centers because each pair of tritones uniquely identifies a 5 chord. You can view a fully diminished chord as a “gateway” of sorts into 4 different keys, depending on what root note you slap on it.




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