Gamelan outside Indonesia of Music in Nova Scotia, Canada, has access to a Gamelan Degung. Students can take an Intro to Gamelan course, or audition for the Gamelan Ensemble. There are also professional gamelan ensembles. Gamelan Son of Lion is a group that focuses on newly composed music by both the composer-members of the group and invited composers from around the world. Gamelan Kori Mas performs Balinese music on bamboo instruments in the San Francisco bay area. Gamelan X is based in Oakland. Since 1979, a few gamelan ensembles have been organized as community arts organizations or clubs. The first Javanese community group
Gamelan Bali, remarked, "Deviations in what is considered the same scale are so large that one might with reason state that there are as many scales as there are gamelans." This view is contested, however, by some teachers of gamelan, and there have been efforts to combine multiple ensembles and tuning structures into one gamelan to ease transportation at festival time. One such ensemble is gamelan "Manikasanti", which can play the repertoire of many different ensembles. Balinese gamelan instruments are built in pairs that are tuned slightly apart to produce interference beats, ideally at a consistent speed for all pairs of