rule of the octave (RO)
Between others' definitions & the actual process of learning it — the "Rule of the Octave" can be an improvisation tool, a composition tool, or an educational tool. I've been trying it out as a music therapy tool, and it's probably very useful in many other ways.
It is built as a “chord scale": think of the notes of a C Major scale as a bass line, and then imagine adding sets of given intervals (like a recipe for tendencies) above each note of that bass line. It gets a lot more interesting than that, but that's the basic idea. (I'll abbreviate "Rule of The Octave" as "RO" from here on out.)
There are a lot of perspectives on this (I’ve been searching and listening to as many of these as I can find). I love learning about different takes on the same idea or concept — feels like it opens you up as a person, while also helping you to better understand why we think or believe as we do.
So, here’s my perspective on RO so far: to me it feels like the equivalent of learning sounds and words from your parents as an infant or toddler, before you can begin to speak on your own. As in, “Maaa da keem”, becomes “Ma do ikeem”, becomes “Mommy da ice-keem”, becomes “Mommy I want more ice cream” — from my perspective, I think this what RO is trying to achieve.
The next steps are applying RO to music (bass-lines called Partimento, or other pieces of music). This is akin to taking English classes in Elementary School or Junior High — where you’re taking a magnifying glass to the sounds & meanings you’re familiar with, in hopes of expanding the comprehension of how language works, while also refining your overall use of language.
Also, the "chord scale" is like a single-note scale in that you don't really use it as is (most of the the time). We need to break it up to create or improvise something with it. Meaning — to play the melody from Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, you have to jump around the "scaffolding" of the scale to play the melody, playing the scale up and down won't get you there.
That’s been my experience with RO. After a few years of playing around with it on piano and guitar (first piano, then adapting for guitar), it really does feel like the sounds a toddler would make in trying to communicate. As much as I’m a fan of music theory texts (that's not sarcasm, I still have all my textbooks from undergrad), I think the guided musical “baby-talk” provided by RO is still missing. However, this is something you have to experience for yourself to comprehend.
I've been (and still am) learning RO from a course by Dr. John Mortenson (at improvplanet.thinkific.com) and other textbooks, and very slowly adapting this into a guitar player's toolset — so we can use it too! I've been breaking all this information up into little chunks, which allows us to express quite a lot with very little — RO is an actual living expression of “less is more”.
Okay, here we go...