Mandolin Fills With A Gypsy Minor

A Gypsy Minor runs 7 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's GDAE 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.

Harmonic minor with a raised 4th — two wide, yearning steps (b3 to #4, b6 to 7) give it a smoldering, theatrical intensity. Dark, exotic, and full of drama.

Heard in: Hungarian and Romani folk, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, gypsy jazz, klezmer, and neoclassical metal.

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.

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.