E Persian, 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.

Intensely exotic — two half-step clusters (b2 against the root, b5 against the 4) and a raised 7th make it the most dramatic of the world scales. Mysterious, ornate, and tense.

Heard in: Persian and Middle-Eastern-flavored melodies, film scoring for desert and ancient settings, and exotic metal and progressive-rock riffs.

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.