While mixolydian, diminished, Lydian dominant and the altered scale are all fairly common choices when playing over 7th chords in various situations, there is one scale that is often overlooked, but that can add a freshness to your lines and take your playing in new directions at the same time.
A human plays a Fender Telecaster equipped with a Porter 9T pickup.
Guitarists who've starting exploring the different possibilities for soloing over dominant 7th chords have probably quickly realized there are a lot of different scales and modes you can use to bring color to this common chord in your solos.
While mixolydian, diminished, Lydian dominant and the altered scale are all fairly common choices when playing over 7th chords in various situations, there is one scale that is often overlooked, but that can add a freshness to your lines and take your playing in new directions at the same time.
This is the tritone scale.
Built by pairing two major triads a tritone apart, and then placing those notes in scale order, the tritone scale brings a nice level of tension to your lines that you can use to build energy when soloing over 7th chords in a jazz or fusion context.
Let’s explore this scale as we check out a short introduction to the tritone scale, its construction, how to use it and some basic fingerings for this scale on the guitar.
What is the Tritone Scale?
To begin our exploration of this uncommon but cool-sounding scale, let’s look at how the scale is built. Basically, the tritone scale is built by taking the notes of a 7b9#11 chord and turning it into a scale. Here's what I mean on paper. Then we’ll dig deeper after you’ve had