#Scales & Lick Categories

A catalog of every scale Mankunku knows and every category in the lick catalog, with notes on what each is used for in the music. This is reference material — flip to it when you need a quick reminder of what Lydian Dominant works over, or whether a Bird-style line lives in the Bebop or ii-V-I category.

#Scales

The app's scale catalog is organized into seven families. Within each family, scales share a parent key (the major modes are all rotations of one major scale; the melodic minor modes are all rotations of one melodic minor scale; and so on).

The "Used over" column tells you the chord types each scale is the standard color choice for.

#Major modes

The seven rotations of the major scale.

The two most common modal-vamp scales are Dorian (think So What, Impressions) and Mixolydian (think any blues or rock-influenced jazz). Lydian is the bright "movie soundtrack" sound (think Days of Wine and Roses or Maiden Voyage's opening). Locrian is the half-diminished scale you reach for on the ii of a minor ii-V-I.

#Melodic minor modes

The seven rotations of the ascending melodic minor scale. These are the workhorse scales of bebop and post-bop reharmonization.

The two most-used members are Lydian Dominant (over a non-functional dominant — V7/IV, or a tritone sub) and Altered (over the V of a minor ii-V-I, or over any V chord where you want to maximize tension). Locrian Natural 2 is a more melodically friendly substitute for Locrian on the ii of a minor ii-V-I.

#Harmonic minor modes

Less common than the melodic minor family, but the Phrygian Dominant mode (5th rotation) is essential for Spanish/flamenco color and minor-key cadences.

#Symmetric scales

Scales built from a repeating interval pattern. They have no "tonic" in the usual sense.

The diminished scales come in two flavors: start with a whole step (over a dim7 chord) or start with a half step (over a dominant 7b9 chord). The Half-Whole is what you reach for on a V7b9 — every common altered tension is in it (b9, #9, #11, 13).

#Pentatonic

Five-note scales. The bedrock of jazz, blues, gospel, rock, and a thousand folk traditions.

McCoy Tyner's quartal pentatonic playing, Wes Montgomery's blues pentatonic, Herbie Hancock's modal pentatonic — three different sounds, all built on the same five-note scaffold.

#Blues

Pentatonic + an added chromatic note (the "blue note").

The minor blues scale (with the b5) is the "default" blues scale most people think of. The major blues is the same shape rotated — it's the major pentatonic with a chromatic between the 2 and the 3. Use it for swing-era and gospel-influenced blues; the minor blues scale is the rock and modern blues sound.

#Bebop

Eight-note scales — a major or minor mode with one chromatic passing note added so that chord tones land on strong beats when the scale is played in eighth notes.

The trick: an eight-note scale played in eighths covers a whole bar of 4/4 with chord tones falling on every downbeat. This is the central rhythmic engineering of bebop. Bird and Dizzy played these scales constantly; if you transcribe their lines, you'll find bebop scale fragments stitched together with arpeggios and enclosures.

#Lick categories

The PhraseCategory type defines eighteen non-user categories (plus user), and the shipped curated catalog populates all of them. Each corresponds to a harmonic context. The sections below walk through the largest hand-curated groupings; the remaining categories — Short ii-V-I (Maj), Short ii-V-I (Min), V-I (Maj), V-I (Min), Major Chord, Dominant Chord, Minor Chord, Diminished Chord, Digital Patterns, and Enclosures — are smaller chord- and pattern-focused collections that round out the catalog.

Beyond the per-category files, three additional curated collections feed into ALL_CURATED_LICKS: Major 4th & 7th (major-4-7.ts, 40 licks) and its volume 2 (major-4-7-vol2.ts, 40 licks), which are tagged primarily into the ii-V-I Major and Bebop Lines categories (with some Digital Patterns and Major Chord entries), and the blues blue-note collection (blues-blue-note.ts, 75 licks) in the Blues category.

#Beginner Cells (55 licks)

Two- and three-note minimal cells, designed for difficulty levels 1–5. The on-ramp into the catalog — short enough that beginners can hear them, recognize them, and play them back without getting overwhelmed.

• 10 major-pentatonic 2-note intervals
• 10 minor-pentatonic 2-note intervals
• 10 major-pentatonic 3-note cells
• 10 minor-pentatonic 3-note cells
• 5 blues 3-note cells
• 5 neighbor-tone and mixed patterns
• 5 blues 2-note intervals

#ii-V-I Major (80 licks)

The most fundamental jazz cadence: minor-7 → dominant-7 → major-7, resolving down a fifth. In C: Dm7 → G7 → Cmaj7.

The category covers the full spectrum:

• Levels 10–25: Basic diatonic resolutions, chord-tone arpeggios.
• Levels 25–40: Eighth-note lines, approach notes into chord tones.
• Levels 40–55: Chromatic approaches, enclosures around target notes.
• Levels 55–75: Extended bebop lines drawing on the vocabulary of Dexter Gordon, Cannonball Adderley, Sonny Stitt.

#Blues (218 licks)

12-bar blues vocabulary, mostly over a static C7 with some I–IV variants (C7 → F7 in the right places). The bulk of these live in two files — blues.ts (120 licks) and the blues-blue-note.ts blue-note collection (75 licks) — with the remainder from beginner cells and the combinatorial generator.

• Levels 10–25: Basic blues-scale patterns.
• Levels 25–40: Blue-note bends, call-and-response shapes.
• Levels 40–65: Extended blues vocabulary with chromatic motion. Material in the spirit of T-Bone Walker, Grant Green, Freddie Hubbard.

#Bebop Lines (37 licks)

Long lines built on bebop scales, chromatic passing tones, and characteristic shapes from the bebop tradition.

• Levels 25–40: Bebop-scale patterns, passing tones.
• Levels 40–55: Enclosures, chromatic approaches.
• Levels 55–75: Extended bebop lines, including a Parker turnaround, a Dizzy high-register figure, an Ornithology fragment.

#ii-V-I Minor (15 licks)

The minor counterpart to ii-V-I Major. In C minor: Dm7b5 → G7alt → Cm7. Different scales — Locrian Natural 2, Altered, Aeolian — and a darker, more chromatic color.

• Levels 25–40: Basic minor ii-V resolutions.
• Levels 40–55: Altered-scale vocabulary.
• Levels 55–75: Advanced lines in the spirit of Woody Shaw, Joe Henderson.

#Pentatonic (100 licks)

Pentatonic vocabulary that works over multiple harmonic contexts — a major-pentatonic line works over Cmaj7, C7, and many other situations because the pentatonic notes are a subset of the major scale.

• Levels 8–20: Basic major and minor pentatonic patterns, sequences.
• Levels 20–45: McCoy Tyner-style fourths, Wes Montgomery shapes, Herbie Hancock-flavored funky patterns, pentatonic superimpositions.

#Modal (10 licks)

Sustained-mode vocabulary for static-harmony tunes. So What is one chord per eight bars; Impressions is the same; Maiden Voyage sustains modal harmony over long stretches. This is the territory.

• Levels 15–35: So What motif, the Dorian characteristic 6th, Coltrane-style Dorian patterns, Lydian floats.
• Levels 35–55: Wayne Shorter angular lines, the Impressions motif, Phrygian color, Hancock-style Dorian vamps.

#Rhythm Changes (7 licks)

The Gershwin "I Got Rhythm" cycle — a I-vi-ii-V repeating pattern in the A section, with a bridge that cycles dominants down a major third or fourth. The bebop test for technical command at speed.

• Levels 30–65: A-section arpeggios, bridge dominant cycles, turnaround patterns. Oleo and Anthropology excerpts.

#Ballad (7 licks)

Slower, more lyrical phrases with sustained notes and space.

• Levels 25–55: Excerpts and ornamentations in the spirit of Body and Soul, Misty, Round Midnight, Lush Life. Chet Baker–style space, ornamental turns.

#Difficulty bands

Each lick has a difficulty level (1–100), displayed as one of ten bands.

Most curated licks live in the 10–75 range; the bands above 75 are mostly populated by the algorithmic generator at high difficulty levels. The Licks page itself filters only by free-text search and by progression (over your own book), not by difficulty band — the band table above is just the reference for reading a lick's difficulty label.

The bands are also color-coded throughout the app — the difficulty tag on each lick card and the level indicator on your dashboard both use the same palette (the --difficulty-N / --mastery-N CSS custom properties).

#Combinatorial licks

In addition to the hand-written licks, the catalog includes about 86 phrases generated by pairing a small set of scale patterns (sequences of scale degrees) with rhythm templates (durations and offsets). Only musically valid pairings — matched note counts, compatible scales — get produced.

The combinatorial licks fill out the lower difficulty bands with variations the curators wouldn't have written by hand because they'd be tedious to write twenty-two times. Internally they carry source: 'combined' (and a combined tag), which distinguishes them from the hand-written phrases. They're part of the curated ear-training catalog, which the personal Licks page doesn't surface, so there's no in-app toggle to filter them out.