G Blues on the Flamenco Guitar

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

G Blues runs 6 notes to the octave, laid across an EADGBE fretboard with every G marked — the pitch a phrase keeps coming home to.

The minor pentatonic with a b5 "blue note" wedged in — that one extra note adds grit, tension, and a sly, vocal quality. Tough, expressive, and unmistakably bluesy.

Heard in: Blues, rock, jazz, rhythm and blues, and boogie-woogie — Delta and Chicago blues, Hendrix, Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan.

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.