Guitar: 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 guitar fill is a flatpicked line, and it lives closest to the vocal melody of any chair in the arrangement — the scale is what fills the bar where the melody is only a long note.

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.