Does anybody know what scale I can use to give a Thai sound on guitar?

A scale name, key, retunings or TAB would be great.

Thanks in advance.

The old trusty minor pentatonic forms the base for a lot of Thai music, especially luuk thung stuff.

If you are talking Thai classical music though, like the one played during Thai boxing games, I wouldn't know... It sounds atonal and disharmonic to me. Possibly it is not though, it could be my Western music preconditioning...

Did some googling. Turns out the Thai scale used in classical music consists of 7 tones with equal distance between them, no division into tones and semitones. It should be hard to accomplish this on a guitar by tuning, because of the frets - ideally you'd need a fretless instrument.

http://www.answers.com/topic/heterophony

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Thailand

Thanks, the good old minor pentaonic it is then, it sounds about right, most of the Thaipop is melancholic, I think there might be a bit of jumping around and finger twisting to get a Thai sound out of it, cheers for the pointer and the links.

Edited February 18, 200719 yr by Robski