Mandolin Fills With E Harmonic Minor

E Harmonic Minor runs 7 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's GDAE fretboard with every E marked, because what a fill needs mid-song is not the pattern — it is where the root is when the chord changes under it.

Dark and dramatic. The raised 7th pulls hard toward the tonic, and the wide step from the b6 up to it gives the scale an exotic, almost Middle-Eastern tension.

Heard in: Classical minor-key harmony, neoclassical metal (Yngwie Malmsteen), flamenco-tinged rock, klezmer, and Balkan melodies.

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