Banjo: Scales for a Country Fill

Pick a root and one of 24 types and see it as it lies on this chair's fretboard, roots marked throughout. Three of these carry most of the repertoire; the rest are for the song nobody warned you about.

A banjo fill is usually still a roll, with the melody notes pushed to the top of it — the scale says which notes the fretting hand can put there, while the open strings and the high drone on the short fifth string keep ringing underneath.

A fill is not a scale played straight through. It is a handful of notes pulled from one, timed to land before the vocal comes back in — which is what a scale map is actually for.