A# Mixolydian Bebop, Mapped for the Bass

A# Mixolydian Bebop runs 8 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.

Mixolydian with a passing major 7th between the b7 and the octave — the bright, bluesy dominant sound with a chromatic slide that keeps every chord tone on a downbeat. Slick, swinging, and quintessentially bebop.

Heard in: Jazz lines over dominant seventh chords, blues changes, and rhythm changes — the workhorse bebop scale.

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.