A Half Whole Diminished — Dobro

A Half Whole Diminished runs 8 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's GBDGBD neck with every A marked, because what you need mid-break is not the pattern — it is where the root is when the chord changes under you. A is one of the four keys a circle calls, so this one comes up.

Tense, symmetrical, and slightly sinister — alternating half and whole steps pack in the b9, #9, #11, and 13, so it sounds like a dominant chord stretched to breaking point. Edgy, jazzy, and restless.

Heard in: Jazz lines over 13b9 dominant chords, fusion, film-noir and horror scoring — the sound of a V chord that refuses to settle.

A dobro break is slid, not fretted: the bar travels to each note, so a scale here is a list of places the bar may stop on the way — and on open-G strings, the stops that ring against an open string are the ones the melody keeps coming back to.

Play it slowly against the audio until the shape stops being a shape, then take it to a tune in A and let the melody pick its own notes out of it.