E Locrian Mode: Chords, Tension and a Root That Won't Sit Still

Take E Phrygian, a dark, Spanish-tinged minor sound, and lower one note. Its fifth, B, drops a half step to Bb. That single change turns E Locrian into a different animal. Phrygian is moody but stable. Locrian never quite lands. Its notes are E, F, G, A, Bb, C, D, and the chord built on E is diminished, a tense, pinched sound that refuses to feel like home. That tension is the most interesting thing about this mode, so this guide starts with the chords and works outward.

Seven chords, one restless home

A chord is three or more notes played together. The simplest kind, a triad, is built by stacking every other note of the scale: start on a note, skip one, take the next, skip one, take the next. Do that from each note of E Locrian and you get seven chords:

• i°: Edim (E-G-Bb), or as a seventh chord, Em7b5
• bII: F (F-A-C) / Fmaj7
• biii: Gm (G-Bb-D) / Gm7
• iv: Am (A-C-E) / Am7
• bV: Bb (Bb-D-F) / Bbmaj7
• bVI: C (C-E-G) / C7
• bvii: Dm (D-F-A) / Dm7

The Roman numerals simply number each chord by its place in the scale. Lowercase means minor, uppercase means major, and the small circle means diminished. The little "b" in front tells you the chord sits a half step lower than it would in an ordinary major key.

Look at the home chord, Edim. A major or minor chord has a perfect fifth on top, a solid, open interval that makes it feel grounded. Edim has Bb instead, a diminished fifth. That interval, six half steps wide, is called a tritone, and it is the most unstable distance in Western music. (A half step is the smallest step there is, like moving from one piano key to the very next.) Building your home on a tritone is like building a house on a seesaw.

How the chords pull against each other

Two chords do most of the work in E Locrian.

F sits just a half step above E. Moving from F back down to Edim creates a dark, sliding resolution, the same half-step drop that gives Phrygian its menace. Play F major on a piano, then slide every finger down to Edim, and listen to how heavy that small move feels.

Bb is the wild card. Its root is the tritone itself, as far from E as you can get. Bb major sounds bright on its own, which makes the drop back to Edim even more unsettling.

Here is the catch: these seven chords are exactly the chords of F major, because E Locrian shares every note with F major. F, C7 and Bb together will drag your ear straight to F as the new home. To keep the Locrian flavour, you have to keep reminding the listener that E is the centre. Stay on Edim or Em7b5 longer than anything else, start and end on it, and keep an E ringing in the bass.

A progression to try

Play this slowly, two bars each, holding an E in the bass throughout if you can:

Em7b5 - Fmaj7 - Em7b5 - Bbmaj7 - Em7b5

The Fmaj7 leans in a half step above, the Bbmaj7 opens up a strange, floating space a tritone away, and each time you return to Em7b5 it feels less like resolving and more like being pulled back into a shadow. That is the Locrian mood.

Why Bb, and not A#

The step pattern for Locrian is H - W - W - H - W - W - W, where W is a whole step (two half steps) and H is a half step. From E: a half step to F, whole step to G, whole step to A, half step to Bb, whole step to C, whole step to D, whole step back to E.

Every scale like this uses each letter name once. A is already taken, so the note after it has to be some kind of B, and the pattern puts it a half step below B natural. That makes it Bb. Writing A# would mean two A's and no B, which would make the notes far harder to read.

Since the notes match F major, E Locrian uses F major's key signature: one flat, Bb. The same notes started from D give you D minor, so D minor, F major and E Locrian are all close relatives. You may also see Fb Locrian mentioned. It sounds identical, but it needs 13 flats to write out. Nobody reads that comfortably, so E Locrian is the spelling to use, and the one musicians actually reach for.

Writing melodies that stay uneasy

A Locrian melody behaves like someone pacing a room. The Bb is the note that defines it: land on it and the instability jumps out, especially against a low E. The F wants to fall to E, and that half-step sigh is the most natural way to end a phrase.

Singers will notice the leap from E up to Bb is awkward to pitch. Approach it from A or C first, step by step, until your ear trusts it. Avoid camping on F or C, or the melody starts sounding like it belongs to F major.

You hear this sound most often in heavy metal, where the half step and the flat fifth suit dark, grinding riffs, and in jazz, where players use Locrian over half-diminished chords like Em7b5.

For guitarists

The open low E string is a gift here: let it drone while you play chords or melodies above it. You will find the root at frets 0, 12 and 24 on the low E string, and at frets 7 and 19 on the A string. Try building riffs from the open E up to the F at fret 1 and the Bb at fret 6 on that same string. That shape alone spells out the mode's character.

One thing to try today

On any instrument, hold or hum a low E. Over it, play F, then E, then Bb, then E, very slowly. Stop on the Bb once and let it hang for a full four beats before falling back. Notice that even the return to E doesn't quite feel finished. That unresolved feeling is what you are learning to write with.

For the bigger picture, read The Locrian Mode.