E Locrian, Guitar Side

7 notes to the octave, mapped below onto this reader's EADGBE fretboard, with every E 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.

The most dissonant, unstable mode — the tonic chord is diminished (b5), making a true Locrian tonal center rare. Used for color and passing harmony.

Heard in: Metal riffs, jazz (half-diminished ø7 chords in ii°7 – V – i), horror and tension film scores.

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 E and let the numbers pick their own notes out of it.