B Half Whole Diminished, Guitar Side

8 notes to the octave, mapped below onto this reader's EADGBE fretboard, with every B called out. Those markers are the useful part mid-bar: a chart moves under you, and the thing you need is where the root went — not where the pattern started.

Tense, symmetrical, and slightly sinister — alternating half and whole steps pack in the b9, #9, #11, and 13, so it sounds like a dominant chord stretched to breaking point. Edgy, jazzy, and restless.

Heard in: Jazz lines over 13b9 dominant chords, fusion, film-noir and horror scoring — the sound of a V chord that refuses to settle.

A chart names the chords and says nothing whatever about the notes between them, so everything a guitarist plays that is not a written chord comes out of a scale that the numbers only imply.

Play it slowly against the audio until the shape stops being a shape, then take it to a chart counted in B and let the numbers pick their own notes out of it.