Get the Dorian flavor with Bebop lines!

Play a half-diminished arpeggio built on the major sixth of a minor chord - as a C#m7b5 over an Em7 - and access the essence of the Dorian flavor. Compared to the E-Natural Minor scale, the E-Dorian Minor scale differs by only one note: The C (the sixth step of the scale) is raised to a C#.

Now, there are plenty of great lines one can come up with using the scalar approach and I really like approaching lines with that angle. But if you have a vocabulary of lines based on chord tone approaches, this trick of superimposing a half-diminished arpeggio over a minor chord will open up a fresh, new door of possibilities when blowing over modal tonalities. Give it a try, even if you've never dabbled in Bebop improvisation before. It will give you at least one new trick within your Dorian playing that you can draw from. For myself over the years, I have come to visualize Dorian tonality more and more thinking of the half-diminished relative grid - based on the important flavor note in Dorian.