Banjo Fills With A Harmonic Minor

A Harmonic Minor runs 7 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's GDGBD fretboard with every A marked, because what a fill needs mid-song is not the pattern — it is where the root is when the chord changes under it.

Dark and dramatic. The raised 7th pulls hard toward the tonic, and the wide step from the b6 up to it gives the scale an exotic, almost Middle-Eastern tension.

Heard in: Classical minor-key harmony, neoclassical metal (Yngwie Malmsteen), flamenco-tinged rock, klezmer, and Balkan melodies.

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.

Play it slowly against the audio until the shape stops being a shape, then take it to a song in A and let the melody pick its own notes out of it.