Mandolin Fills With A# Persian

A# Persian 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.

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 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.