D Persian — Dobro

D Persian runs 7 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's GBDGBD neck with every D marked, because what you need mid-break is not the pattern — it is where the root is when the chord changes under you. D is one of the four keys a circle calls, so this one comes up.

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.

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 D and let the melody pick its own notes out of it.