A# Gypsy Minor, Mapped for the Bass

A# Gypsy Minor runs 7 notes to the octave, laid across this seat's EADG fretboard with every A# marked. A blues phrase is short and keeps coming home to one pitch; the marked notes are where it comes home to.

Harmonic minor with a raised 4th — two wide, yearning steps (b3 to #4, b6 to 7) give it a smoldering, theatrical intensity. Dark, exotic, and full of drama.

Heard in: Hungarian and Romani folk, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, gypsy jazz, klezmer, and neoclassical metal.

On the bass a scale supplies the notes between one chord and the next — the steps a line takes on its way to the change — far more often than it is played as a run.

Whatever scale you start from, the blues bends it: the third and the seventh get pushed flat, or somewhere between flat and natural, and that pull against the chord underneath is most of what the idiom sounds like.