G# Mixolydian Bebop, Mapped for the Guitar

G# Mixolydian Bebop runs 8 notes to the octave, laid across this seat's EADGBE fretboard with every G# marked. A blues phrase is short and keeps coming home to one pitch; the marked notes are where it comes home to.

Mixolydian with a passing major 7th between the b7 and the octave — the bright, bluesy dominant sound with a chromatic slide that keeps every chord tone on a downbeat. Slick, swinging, and quintessentially bebop.

Heard in: Jazz lines over dominant seventh chords, blues changes, and rhythm changes — the workhorse bebop scale.

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.