F Persian on the Flamenco Guitar

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

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

Intensely exotic — two half-step clusters (b2 against the root, b5 against the 4) and a raised 7th make it the most dramatic of the world scales. Mysterious, ornate, and tense.

Heard in: Persian and Middle-Eastern-flavored melodies, film scoring for desert and ancient settings, and exotic metal and progressive-rock riffs.

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.