How To Spice Up Your Guitar Solos ! Modal exploration on the guitar [Phrygian Mode]

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Take a plain E minor chord and treat it as a modal chord rather than a relative-minor one, and you unlock the haunting, Spanish-tinged sound of E Phrygian. Here's how.

E minor as a modal chord

Normally over an E minor chord you'd pull notes from the E natural (relative) minor scale. Instead, treat that E minor as the third chord in the key of C. Line up the chords in C and you get C major, D minor, E minor. So you surround the E minor with notes from the key of C, which is easy because C has no sharps or flats.

Run up the key of C starting on E (using the open high E string): E, F, G, A, B, C, D, and back to the octave E. Starting with that E-to-F half step right away is what makes it unique. It almost has a Spanish sound. That's E Phrygian.

Ornamenting the chord

Now play around the E minor chord with those notes. Hold the chord and raise the E on the D string up a half step to F for an almost mystical sound, then move through the scale tones from the key of C. One chord Adam likes uses an E, a B at the 2nd fret, an F at the 3rd fret (that gives the Phrygian flavor), plus an A on the G string.

Experiment at home: hold your E minor, and with a spare finger add any note that's in the key of C. To hear it in context, try a Phrygian progression like E minor → F → G.