Guitar: D Persian Over the Changes

Where D Persian lies at this seat, and what a chorus takes out of it.

D Persian runs 7 notes to the octave, laid out here on EADGBE with every D 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.

A guitar chorus is a single line with the comp dropped, so a scale here is what the picking hand walks through between the two or three phrases it actually meant to play.

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.