G# Dorian Scale on Puerto Rican Cuatro

Play the G# Dorian scale on Puerto Rican Cuatro with fretboard diagrams that map the pattern across the neck. The Dorian scale has 7 notes per octave and belongs to the modes family.

1 of Puerto Rican Cuatro's 5 open courses belongs to G# Dorian: B (the flat 3rd). The E, A, D and G strings fall outside it, and G# is not available open. Open, the courses cover E3 to G4.

Minor with a raised 6th (natural 6) — soulful, smooth, and less dark than natural minor. The quintessential jazz-minor and blues mode.

Heard in: "So What" (Miles Davis), "Oye Como Va" (Santana), "Eleanor Rigby" (Beatles) — rock, blues, funk, jazz.

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 G# Dorian scale to the chords it harmonizes and to progressions in the key of G# 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.