Guitar Fills With A Locrian

A Locrian runs 7 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's EADGBE 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.

The most dissonant, unstable mode — the tonic chord is diminished (b5), making a true Locrian tonal center rare. Used for color and passing harmony.

Heard in: Metal riffs, jazz (half-diminished ø7 chords in ii°7 – V – i), horror and tension film scores.

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.

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.