Lap Steel Fills With F# Persian

F# Persian runs 7 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's CEGACE neck with every F# marked, because what a fill needs mid-song is not the pattern — it is where the root is when the chord changes under it.

Intensely exotic — two half-step clusters (b2 against the root, b5 against the 4) and a raised 7th make it the most dramatic of the world scales. Mysterious, ornate, and tense.

Heard in: Persian and Middle-Eastern-flavored melodies, film scoring for desert and ancient settings, and exotic metal and progressive-rock riffs.

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