C6 Pedal Steel: Scales for a Country Fill

Pick a root and one of 24 types and see it as it lies on this chair's neck, roots marked throughout. Three of these carry most of the repertoire; the rest are for the song nobody warned you about.

A pedal steel fill is a line the bar and the pedals share: the bar comes to rest on a fret, and a pedal or lever raises a ringing string into the next note of the line, so a scale here marks the resting places and the notes a bend can reach from them.

A fill is not a scale played straight through. It is a handful of notes pulled from one, timed to land before the vocal comes back in — which is what a scale map is actually for.