C# Lydian, Mapped for the Guitar

C# Lydian runs 7 notes to the octave, laid across this seat's EADGBE fretboard with every C# 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 raised 4th (#4) — dreamy, ethereal, and floating. Often called the brightest mode, with an otherworldly suspended quality.

Heard in: Film scores, progressive rock, jazz — Joe Satriani's "Flying in a Blue Dream", John Williams, Steve Vai.

On the guitar a scale is mostly raw material for bends: a note a fret or two below the one you want, pushed up until it sounds right against the chord, which is how a fretted instrument reaches the pitches between its frets.

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.