D Major on the Flamenco Guitar

Where D Major lies on the fretboard of a guitar tuned EADGBE, and how a flamenco passage lands it on the count.

D Major runs 7 notes to the octave, laid across an EADGBE fretboard with every D marked — the pitch a phrase keeps coming home to.

Bright, resolved, and stable. The foundation of Western tonal music and the most common mode in pop, classical, folk, and jazz.

Heard in: Pop, classical, country, folk, gospel — the default major tonality of Western music.

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.