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The altered scale is not one distance from home. Sometimes it is four notes away. Sometimes it is one.
Every dominant chord’s altered scale sits a fixed distance from the key you are already playing in, and that distance depends on one thing: which degree the chord is built on. On Spain you get four different distances in twenty-four bars.
Four pages. The distance ladder, Spain measured chord by chord, and what the repertoire actually asks of you.
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Spain opens on four bars of G major seven, in the key of two sharps. Then the F sharp seven arrives and sits there for another four bars. That is the chord most of us brace for.
Take the C sharp down to C. Take the B down to B flat. Nothing else moves.
What is left is G melodic minor, which is where the altered scale on that chord comes from. Five of the seven notes are the ones you have been playing since the first bar. It is not a new scale; it is a known one with two notes moved.
Work that out for every degree of the key and the pattern is rigid. It holds in all twelve keys, and it is not a matter of taste or nerve.
| Notes that change | Dominant built on | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 note | ♭II7 VII7 | in Spain: C♯7 |
| 2 notes | III7 ♭V7 ♭VI7 | in Spain: F♯7 |
| 3 notes | ♭III7 VI7 | in Spain: B7 |
| 4 notes | II7 IV7 V7 ♭VII7 | in Spain: A7 |
| 5 notes | I7 | — |
Twenty-four bars of blowing changes, four altered dominants, no two the same distance out. That is why the tune is such a good laboratory.
| Chord | Degree | Altered scale is | Out | Which notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C♯7 | VII | D melodic minor | 1 | F♯ → F |
| F♯7 | III | G melodic minor | 2 | B C♯ → B♭ C |
| B7 | VI | C melodic minor | 3 | E F♯ C♯ → E♭ F C |
| A7 | V | B♭ melodic minor | 4 | D E F♯ B → E♭ F B♭ C |
The C sharp seven is the one to notice. One note moves — the F sharp becomes F natural — and it is the most outside-sounding chord in the phrase. The A seven, which sounds far more ordinary, is four.
I measured every dominant chord in our chart library against its own tune’s key signature: 1,062 tunes, 17,280 dominant chords.
Six in ten are four or five notes out. Not because the repertoire is adventurous — because the five chord alone is 29% of every dominant in the library, and the five chord is a four-note move. So when an altered line over a V chord feels like it has left the tune behind, that is not a failure of ear. Four of the seven notes have genuinely changed.
On the A seven in Spain there are four honest answers, and they line up by distance.
None of those is the right one. They are four different distances from home, and which you want depends on how far out you mean to be at that moment in the phrase.
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Every musical example in the guide is original. The scale spellings, distances and counts were computed and checked rather than recalled. No melody or transcription of any copyrighted composition is reproduced. More lessons, play-alongs and practice tools at fretprints.com.