E Dorian Bebop Scale on 5-String Banjo

Play the E Dorian Bebop scale on 5-String Banjo with fretboard diagrams that map the pattern across the neck. The Dorian Bebop scale has 8 notes per octave and belongs to the bebop family.

All 3 of 5-String Banjo's open strings fall inside E Dorian Bebop — g (the flat 3rd), D (the flat 7th), B (the 5th) — though E itself has to be stopped. Open, the strings cover D3 to G4.

Dorian with a chromatic passing tone slipped between the b3 and the 4 — eight notes, so chord tones keep landing on the strong beats in a run of eighth notes. Cool, flowing, and swinging.

Heard in: Bebop and straight-ahead jazz lines over minor seventh chords — Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and the Barry Harris approach.

It has a drum head rather than a wooden top, so notes bloom and die fast.

Each position shows the scale notes and their intervals from the root so you can connect the shape to its sound, hear it with audio playback, and practice it in any register. Movable patterns let you transpose the same fingering to other keys once it is learned.

Once a position is under your fingers, link the E Dorian Bebop scale to the chords it harmonizes and to progressions in the key of E to start improvising and writing with it. Working a scale alongside its chords is the fastest way to make it stick and to hear how it colors a progression.