A Whole Half Diminished — Dobro

A Whole Half 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.

Unstable and eerie — alternating whole and half steps, with the b3, b5, and 6 spelling a diminished seventh chord in every direction. Ominous, symmetrical, and unresolved.

Heard in: Diminished seventh chords in classical and jazz, horror and suspense scores, Bartok and Stravinsky, and neoclassical metal.

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.