I can't live without the subdominant (and the leading tone)

 

Let my finish that for you...................................
Many folksongs are pentatonic, or nearly pentatonic. Well-known songs such as "Land of the Silver Birch" or "Auld Lang Syne" are pentatonic tunes.

Classical composers have sometimes used pentatonic scales, especially Claude Debussy. His piano piece La fille aux cheveux de lin has a tune which is pentatonic except for one note. Maurice Ravel used it to write music which sounded Chinese, and in his Mother Goose suite (Ma Mère l'Oye) which sounds like a fairy tale.
Funny that you would omit this from your post.
Pentatonic scales occur in the following traditions:

• Celtic folk music[3]
• English Folk Music[4]
• German folk music[5]
• Nordic folk music[citation needed]
• Hungarian folk music[6]
• Croatian folk music[6]
• West African music[7]
• African-American spirituals[8]
• Gospel music[9]
• Bluegrass music[10]
• American folk music[11]
• Music of Ethiopia[7]
• Jazz[12]
• Blues[13]
• Rock music[14]
• Sami joik singing[15]
• Children's song[16]
• The music of ancient Greece[17][18]
  • Greek traditional music and polyphonic songs from Epirus in northwest Greece[19]
• Music of southern Albania[20]
• Folk songs of peoples of the Middle Volga region (such as the Mari, the Chuvash and Tatars)[21]
• The tuning of the Ethiopian krar[7] and the Indonesian gamelan[22]
• Philippine kulintang[23]
• Native American music
• Melodies of China, Korea, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, and Vietnam (including the folk music of these countries)[citation needed]
• Andean music[24]
• Afro-Caribbean music[25]
• Polish highlanders from the Tatra Mountains[26]
• Western Impressionistic composers such as French composer Claude Debussy.[27]

Examples of its use include Chopin's Etude in G-flat major, op. 10, no. 5, the "Black Key" etude,[1] in the major pentatonic.

Oh. That's what those sounds are supposed to be.

 

Kontakt has a function of key constrain in every libary,
(open the script by clicking on the icon - select a <empty> tab - select the preset - select a key - select a scale)
it has the option to use the pentatonic scale, so people can listen/play with it, who are interested but don't want to put in all the effort

Great video

 

Here you are a list of all pentatonic scales: from 5-1 to 5-z38B
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pitch_class_sets

You can get any scale combining pitch class sets.

 

One of my first tracks ever (finished) used a pentatonic major scale and it sounded sooo much oriental that I had to transform it into a chinese-dance song lol (no self-ad, just posting one of my older works ).

In fact everytime I play something using only those five keys, it has an oriental feeling/sound to it, but then I just discovered it's also used by many other countries. It's the "world" scale, being used almost everywhere it seems (past, present, and probably future). I think it's how you use those notes, because as mentioned above, a lot of pop/folk songs also make use of the major pentatonic.

Honestly, why they say there's no feeling of a certain key? To me the key is pretty clear if you play a simple melody (as long as you just don't bash mindlessly the keys). Yes, the leading tone is missing, but you still have the dominant and the other tones of the scale (sub-mediant I think it's the sixth, and the second one which should be super-tonic or something like that) that help you define a sense of home, which resolves around the root note. Obviously harmony plays a huge factor too, you can have that

Cool vid as usual

 

There is no sense of a home key, because you can repeat fragments of your pentatonic melody and use a different note for a cadence every time.
You can't do this with a 7 note scales (if you do it, you are basically modulating through the different modes of the scale).
You can harmonize C maj pentatonic with drones with (any scale degree), power chords, major, incomplete min 7, whole tone trichord, incomplete dom7 chord, sus4, min chord...
There is a reason why pentatonics are so popular in improvisation and in the 20 century classical music (Stravinsky "Rite of Springs" and so on).
You can play them over all kind of scales and dissonant clusters and they still sound good. You can find all the pentatonic scales in my previous post - the wiki link lists around 40 pentatonic scales along with all 0 up to 12 note scales playable in 12 TET

 

Thanks, makes more sense now!

 

Thanks for that post mate, I'll add an annotation to show my error. I said note when I meant harmonic, the problem when trying to simplify a complex problem is sometime you have to balance simplifying things with dumbing it down too much. I probably crossed that line there.

 

That's fine, if you watch my video you will find out where that blue note comes from and why it's totally fine to use it, in fact it's encouraged.

 

Eventually in the harmonic series you get every key of the scale, including the leading tone. It's just because we hear the first set of harmonics louder than the later harmonics that we perceive those five notes as being 'better' for lack of a better word.

 

In the harmonic series you get them eventually. You have a good point though, I think it's important to bring a production to the next level to call response and tension release, I may do a vid on it soon.

 

Good point, another cool thing about pentatonics is you can leave out the fundamental as it can be implied, so that brings your notes to four. Then you can reduce them to two notes by just playing the quality notes. Which are the 3rd and 7th. So technically you could write a song that as it's cadence has only two notes. Like this song...

Crazy right?