E Natural Minor on the Flamenco Guitar

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

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

The standard natural minor scale — melancholic, introspective, and deeply emotive. The most common minor sound in Western music.

Heard in: Pop, rock, classical, metal — the default minor sound 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.