C Whole Tone — Cavaquinho
C Whole Tone, fingered across 4 strings with home lit throughout — fill material for the space between chops.
C Whole Tone is 6 notes to the octave (symmetric family), drawn here across the Cavaquinho's DGBD strings with every C marked, so home stays visible from anywhere in the pattern.
Weightless and dreamlike — six equal whole steps with no leading tone, so nothing pulls anywhere. Blurry, floating, and faintly unsettling, like a dream sequence.
Heard in: Impressionist piano (Debussy's "Voiles"), Thelonious Monk's runs, dream-sequence film cues, and the augmented and 7#5 chords it fits in jazz.
Four strings tuned DGBD put a scale somewhere honest and a little cramped: two or three notes to a string, no spare string to hide on, and every open pair climbing rather than doubling back. These maps mark every root so the top voice never loses home mid-run.
Practise it as a fill, not a ladder: pick four of its notes, drop them into the rests of a batida cell, then slide the same four to the next position. That is how this instrument actually uses a scale — a top voice riding above the chop, not a run played alone.