Upright Bass: B Gypsy Major Over the Changes

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

B Gypsy Major runs 7 notes to the octave, laid out here on EADG with every B 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 upright takes a chorus less often than anyone, and that is exactly why these matter: the notes between one chord root and the next come out of a scale, and a walk that lands on the wrong one is the loudest wrong note in the room.

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.