E Phrygian, Mapped for the Bass

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

Very dark minor with a half-step above the tonic. Spanish, Flamenco, and metal flavor — exotic, tense, and mysterious.

Heard in: Flamenco, metal, dark film scores — Carlos Santana solos, Joe Satriani's "War", Moorish and Andalusian 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.