Lap Steel Fills With A Lydian

A Lydian runs 7 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.

Major with a raised 4th (#4) — dreamy, ethereal, and floating. Often called the brightest mode, with an otherworldly suspended quality.

Heard in: Film scores, progressive rock, jazz — Joe Satriani's "Flying in a Blue Dream", John Williams, Steve Vai.

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.