E9 Pedal Steel Fills With E Blues

E Blues runs 6 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's E9 neck 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.

The minor pentatonic with a b5 "blue note" wedged in — that one extra note adds grit, tension, and a sly, vocal quality. Tough, expressive, and unmistakably bluesy.

Heard in: Blues, rock, jazz, rhythm and blues, and boogie-woogie — Delta and Chicago blues, Hendrix, Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan.

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