F Harmonic Minor, Mapped for the Bass

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

Dark and dramatic. The raised 7th pulls hard toward the tonic, and the wide step from the b6 up to it gives the scale an exotic, almost Middle-Eastern tension.

Heard in: Classical minor-key harmony, neoclassical metal (Yngwie Malmsteen), flamenco-tinged rock, klezmer, and Balkan melodies.

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.