Bass Fills With D Rock 'n' Roll

D Rock 'n' Roll runs 6 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's EADG fretboard with every D marked, because what a fill needs mid-song is not the pattern — it is where the root is when the chord changes under it.

Major pentatonic with a b3 rubbed against the natural 3 — bright and bouncy with a bluesy smirk. Playful, swinging, and built for boogie riffs.

Heard in: Fifties rock, rockabilly, boogie-woogie, Chuck Berry-style riffs, and jump blues.

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 D and let the melody pick its own notes out of it.