F# Gypsy Minor on the Flamenco Guitar

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

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

Harmonic minor with a raised 4th — two wide, yearning steps (b3 to #4, b6 to 7) give it a smoldering, theatrical intensity. Dark, exotic, and full of drama.

Heard in: Hungarian and Romani folk, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, gypsy jazz, klezmer, 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.