C6 Pedal Steel Fills With D Lydian

Where D Lydian lies on C6 Pedal Steel's neck, and the fill it feeds.

D Lydian runs 7 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's C6 neck with every D 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 with a raised 4th (#4) — dreamy, ethereal, and floating. Often called the brightest mode, with an otherworldly suspended quality.

Heard in: Film scores, progressive rock, jazz — Joe Satriani's "Flying in a Blue Dream", John Williams, Steve Vai.

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.

Play it slowly against the audio until the shape stops being a shape, then take it to a song in D and let the melody pick its own notes out of it.