A very interesting thing I didn’t know about: the Xavian scale, Steve Vai’s “own” scale. Well, did you know about that? A very interesting topic that I have never thought about. Really, it shows you how deeply involved in his music Steve Vai really is.

For me, all those scales out there contains some of the same 12 notes in a “standard” chromatic scale and honestly I have never thought about another way of dividing the space between 2 octaves. Well, I guess somebody else did…

Think about taking this available “space” and divide it in another number of equal intervals, not in 12 as we commonly know. Divide it in 10 spaces, or in 8, or in 9, or in 20 spaces…whatever… The result? Well, you could name it “another chromatic scale”, I guess. This is exactly what Steve Vai did: took this space and divided it in 16 equal spaces and then, by experimenting a lot, he took 10 notes out of 16 and built his “own scale”, Xavian. Speaking about playing like Steve Vai…

Of course, you won’t be able to do this with a regular guitar, no matter how good you are, since it is not built for this. Vai couldn’t do it either so he asked Steve Ripley to build such a 16 intervals guitar for him. He also has a 24 intervals guitar…

Seems that Deep down into the pain song is the only record where he actually used the Xavian scale. Listen closely the end of the song. I know that Steve Vai uses strange modes all over his music, but his own scale with notes outside the known Universe, man, that’s weird…

What do you think about this? Read more about this here and come back and comment, I would like to know your thoughts on this!!

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