Mandolin Fills With E Spanish

E Spanish 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.

Fiery and exotic — the b2 presses against the root while the major 3rd keeps it from sounding plainly minor. Flamenco heat with a Middle-Eastern edge: dramatic, urgent, and passionate.

Heard in: Flamenco and Spanish classical guitar, klezmer and "Hava Nagila", Arabic and Jewish liturgical music, metal riffs, and the V chord of harmonic minor.

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.