Upright Bass: Eb Persian Over the Changes

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

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.

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.