Mandolin Fills With E Rock 'n' Roll

E Rock 'n' Roll runs 6 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.

Major pentatonic with a b3 rubbed against the natural 3 — bright and bouncy with a bluesy smirk. Playful, swinging, and built for boogie riffs.

Heard in: Fifties rock, rockabilly, boogie-woogie, Chuck Berry-style riffs, and jump blues.

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.