Electric Bass: C Gypsy Major Over the Changes

Where C Gypsy Major lies at this seat, and what a chorus takes out of it.

C Gypsy Major runs 7 notes to the octave, laid out here on EADG with every C flagged. Mid-chorus the pattern is not what you need; where the root is when the chord changes underneath you is.

Brash and colorful — a #2 crushed against the major 3rd and a #4 give it a Lydian-dominant swagger with a Romani twist. Bold, spicy, and unpredictable.

Heard in: Hungarian and Romani folk, Bartok and Liszt, gypsy-jazz flourishes, and fusion lines over dominant chords.

The electric bass can hold a note long enough for it to be heard as a choice rather than a step, so a scale here is read for its strong tones first and its passing tones second.

Play it slowly against the audio until it stops being a shape, then put it over two bars of a form and let the chord tones decide which of the notes you actually keep.