A Persian Scale on Puerto Rican Cuatro

Play the A Persian scale on Puerto Rican Cuatro with fretboard diagrams that map the pattern across the neck. The Persian scale has 7 notes per octave and belongs to the world family.

A is available as an open course on Puerto Rican Cuatro, and 2 of its 5 open courses are scale tones — A (the root), D (the 4th). The B, E and G strings sit outside the scale. Open, the courses cover E3 to G4.

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.

Puerto Rican Cuatro is strung in five courses of two, the lower two paired an octave apart, so each stopped note here sounds as two — which is why the shape rings thicker than the same grip on a single-strung instrument.

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 A Persian scale to the chords it harmonizes and to progressions in the key of A 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.