D Dorian Scale on Resonator Guitar

Play the D Dorian scale on Resonator Guitar with fretboard diagrams that map the pattern across the neck. The Dorian scale has 7 notes per octave and belongs to the modes family.

Every open string on Resonator Guitar belongs to D Dorian, D among them — G (the 4th), B (the 6th), D (the root). That makes ringing open notes a free voice under the line. Open, the strings cover G2 to D4.

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.

It has a metal cone instead of a soundboard, which is where the volume and the bark come from. Every position is a straight bar or a short declared slant over the open-G strings; a chord no bar shape spells is marked, not charted.

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