B Aeolian, Mapped for the Bass

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

The standard natural minor scale — melancholic, introspective, and deeply emotive. The most common minor sound in Western music.

Heard in: Pop, rock, classical, metal — the default minor sound of Western music.

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.