Mandolin: 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 mandolin fill is short and often tremolo-doubled, so the scale here is a source of two- and three-note runs between the vocal phrases, not a ladder to climb.

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.