B Whole Half Diminished, Piano Side

8 notes to the octave, lit below across two octaves of this reader's keyboard, with every key numbered by where it sits in the scale. The numbers are the useful part mid-bar: a chart moves under you, and the thing you need is which degree is still under the hand — not where the run started.

Unstable and eerie — alternating whole and half steps, with the b3, b5, and 6 spelling a diminished seventh chord in every direction. Ominous, symmetrical, and unresolved.

Heard in: Diminished seventh chords in classical and jazz, horror and suspense scores, Bartok and Stravinsky, and neoclassical metal.

The right hand takes the fill and the left keeps the written number sounding under it, so a piano reader hears every note of the scale against the chord the chart called rather than in place of it.

Run it hands together until the window stops being a pattern, then take it to a chart counted in B and let the numbers pick their own notes out of it.