A# Mixolydian, Mapped for the Bass

A# Mixolydian 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.

Major with a flatted 7th (b7) — bright and bluesy. The dominant chord turned into a tonal center with a rock/folk edge.

Heard in: "Sweet Home Chicago", "Norwegian Wood" (Beatles), Celtic and folk music — anywhere a major sound needs a darker, looser edge.

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.