C Whole Half Diminished on the Flamenco Guitar
Where C Whole Half Diminished lies on the fretboard of a guitar tuned EADGBE, and how a flamenco passage lands it on the count.
C Whole Half Diminished runs 8 notes to the octave, laid across an EADGBE fretboard with every C marked — the pitch a phrase keeps coming home to.
Unstable and eerie — alternating whole and half steps, with the b3, b5, and 6 spelling a diminished seventh chord in every direction. Ominous, symmetrical, and unresolved.
Heard in: Diminished seventh chords in classical and jazz, horror and suspense scores, Bartok and Stravinsky, and neoclassical metal.
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.