E Dorian Scale on Tenor Guitar

Play the E Dorian scale on Tenor 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.

3 of Tenor Guitar's 4 open strings belong to E Dorian: G (the flat 3rd), D (the flat 7th), A (the 4th). The C string falls outside it, and E is not available open. Open, the strings cover C3 to A4.

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 flat wooden top, so the same grip sustains far longer than it does on a tenor banjo.

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 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.