E9 Pedal Steel Fills With B Gypsy Minor

B Gypsy Minor runs 7 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's E9 neck with every B marked, because what a fill needs mid-song is not the pattern — it is where the root is when the chord changes under it.

Harmonic minor with a raised 4th — two wide, yearning steps (b3 to #4, b6 to 7) give it a smoldering, theatrical intensity. Dark, exotic, and full of drama.

Heard in: Hungarian and Romani folk, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, gypsy jazz, klezmer, and neoclassical metal.

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