G Persian, Lap Steel Side

7 notes to the octave, mapped below onto this reader's CEGACE neck, with every G 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.

With a bar instead of fingers, a scale is a set of stopping places rather than a set of grips, and the slide between two of them is as much of the line as either end.

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