Improving Your Mastery Level: Top-3 Challenging RAV Vast Scales

You have already learned a lot about playing the tongue drum or the handpan. Now you are so to speak ready to do a handstand (those who practice yoga or gymnastics, we can hear your uh-oh). Thus, it’s time to try a new challenging scale. You might have already started to look for a handpan drum for sale and have no idea which one to pick up! Here are 3 scales that will make you go an extra mile and make headway to become an outstanding player.

How can some certain scale improve my skills?

Playing the tongue drum or the handpan isn’t that hard. Anyone can produce a nice sound by randomly tapping the notes of the drum. However, if you want to compose some really great music (or even record an album) and become a pro, you have to pull your socks up and learn new things. Choosing a challenging scale is a great tool for that as it makes you rack your brains, think ahead, choose some particular note progressions. The deal is only about choosing the right instrument, and maybe you’ve already viewed a lot of drums for sale including tank drum, steel tongue drums, opsilon handpans and etc.

The RAV Vast is a great instrument to improve both tongue drum and handpan playing skills. It provides an ease of learning of tongue drum and yet has an incredibly deep sound of amazing quality (equals to the sound quality of handpan) with many overtones (up to 7) and long sustain (up to 25 seconds), and the price is twice more affordable than that of a handpan. The RAV Vast is in the “sweet spot” between the handpans and tongue drums. RAV also provides a good bunch of scales for advanced musicians who are ready to experiment with the new sound.

The scales picked up here were chosen for a particular reason. Some of them are tricky because they have a very specific ethnic feel that might be hard to deal with for those who are used to the European music tradition. Some scales are hard because of the note layout and a big number of halftones. All the scales provide a different feel, so think first about the feel you want to get.

A Integral

A Integral is an apple of one’s eye of all the challenging scales. It has a classic sound and provides a good scope of tools for experiments. The note layout gives you an opportunity to choose between the major and minor mode. Just change the root note and choose certain notes to play a minor or major note progression. If you tap the central note (the Ding), you’ll get a minor feel. If you change the root note to the bottom C3 note, you’ll get a major melody.

With the help of the A Integral RAV Vast you perfectly boost your coupling skills by experimenting with inverted coupling pairing the contrasting notes (you can get some very interesting dyads and triads).

This scale requires a very accurate tuning, thus it’s made of a thinner steel of 1.5 mm that makes its sound so specific. It matches with a good number of other RAV Vast scales (in case you plan to pair it) and will sound good with the guitar, violin or Native American flute. This scale creates a melancholic feel and will be great to use for a meditation or a soloist instrument for moody compositions.

B Onoleo

This is a scale with Egyptian and Arabian flavour. Designed for serious professionals, it provides you with a lot of harmonic variation. However, this scale makes you use your little grey cells to avoid some certain disharmonious note couplings (it has 2 semitones in the layout).

The B Onoleo is relative to the harmonic B Major scale. This scale partakes of harmonic minor and diatonic major but mainly provides a major feel. Most of the intervals gravitate to the major mode although you can still create some minor progressions.

Due to the very authentic sound, this is definitely a solo-play scale. It’s also a perfect instrument to do busking a improve your public playing and self-confidence.

G Humayun

This scale has a very specific ethnic sound inspired by traditional Middle-Eastern music. The G Humayun will be suitable for those who are looking for something unique. It is based on the Azerbaijan mugham (scale) called Humayun. You might have heard the amazing and incredibly fast fingerpicking used in Arabian music. This scale gives you a chance to practice this playing style (and fast playing is really challenging for many musicians).

You can change the scale of your composition to harmonic A minor scale by switching the keynote from the Ding’s G3 to A4. This scale is really one of a kind and its sound is really exotic. Thus, it makes you explore the limits and go further with the instrument.