E Gypsy Major on the Flamenco Guitar

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

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

Brash and colorful — a #2 crushed against the major 3rd and a #4 give it a Lydian-dominant swagger with a Romani twist. Bold, spicy, and unpredictable.

Heard in: Hungarian and Romani folk, Bartok and Liszt, gypsy-jazz flourishes, and fusion lines over dominant chords.

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.