Locrian Mode

The Locrian mode on the guitar is a highly unstable, tense scale with a dark and unresolved sound used primarily in heavy metal and avant-garde jazz. It is the seventh mode of the major scale, built by flattening the second, third, fifth, sixth, and seventh notes (1, b2, b3, 4, b5, b6, b7). Guitarists rarely use it for long melodies because its flattened fifth interval creates a diminished chord as its root, stripping away any sense of a musical home base. Instead, it is highly prized by extreme metal guitarists for writing sinister, chaotic riffs and by jazz fusion players for navigating half-diminished chords.