C# Phrygian, Mapped for the Guitar

C# Phrygian 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.

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 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.