B Harmonic Minor on the Flamenco Guitar

Where B Harmonic Minor lies on the fretboard of a guitar tuned EADGBE, and how a flamenco passage lands it on the count.

B Harmonic Minor runs 7 notes to the octave, laid across an EADGBE fretboard with every B marked — the pitch a phrase keeps coming 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 flamenco guitar a scale is the raw material of the falseta — a composed melodic passage the guitarist drops between sung verses — and of the runs a toque answers the cante with.

Whatever notes a passage runs through, it is measured in compás: it sets off and comes to rest where the count of the palo allows, so every scale here is finally heard against a cycle of accents.