Lap Steel Fills With A Blues

A Blues runs 6 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's CEGACE neck 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 minor pentatonic with a b5 "blue note" wedged in — that one extra note adds grit, tension, and a sly, vocal quality. Tough, expressive, and unmistakably bluesy.

Heard in: Blues, rock, jazz, rhythm and blues, and boogie-woogie — Delta and Chicago blues, Hendrix, Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan.

A lap steel fill glides between the singer's lines, often on two strings at once, so a scale here marks the frets where the bar may come to rest — the glide carries the line, and the scale keeps every landing note inside the song's key.

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.