Bass Fills With C Harmonic Minor

Where C Harmonic Minor lies on Bass's fretboard, and the fill it feeds.

C Harmonic Minor runs 7 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's EADG fretboard with every C 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.

The bass rarely takes a fill, and that is precisely why these matter: the notes between one root and the next come out of the scale, and a walk that lands wrong is the loudest mistake in the mix.

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