C Locrian on Guitar

Locrian is the unstable one: both the 2nd and the 5th are flattened, so home itself is a diminished chord that never feels settled. The notes of C Locrian are C, Db, Eb, F, Gb, Ab, Bb. Its characteristic note is Gb — the flat 5th — the one note that gives this diminished scale its colour.

With no perfect 5th to stand on, Locrian refuses to resolve — which is exactly why metal (Slayer, Meshuggah territory) and jazz players reaching for maximum tension keep it around. It is less a place to live than a place to pass through menacingly.

C Locrian across the whole neck

Standard tuning, frets 0–12. The gold notes are the root (C); every colour marks an interval, the same palette the app uses.

Practice C Locrian over a drone →Free, in your browser. It listens through your mic and lights up what you play.

Over the drone, notice how even the root feels provisional — the flat 5th keeps kicking the floor out. Resolving anywhere else afterwards feels like surfacing.

Formula and intervals

R - b2 - b3 - 4 - b5 - b6 - b7 — 7 notes. The flat 3rd and flat 5th stack into a diminished triad on the root.

Chords in C Locrian

These are the diatonic chords — the harmony built from only the notes above. Vamping between any of them keeps you inside the mode.

Degree	Chord	Quality
i°	Cdim	Diminished
II	Db	Major
iii	Ebm	Minor
iv	Fm	Minor
V	Gb	Major
VI	Ab	Major
vii	Bbm	Minor

Same notes, different home

C Locrian contains exactly the same notes as Db Major. Nothing about the notes changes — what changes is which one feels like home, and that changes everything about the sound.

Other modes on C