E9 Pedal Steel Fills With F# Locrian

F# Locrian runs 7 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's E9 neck with every F# 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 most dissonant, unstable mode — the tonic chord is diminished (b5), making a true Locrian tonal center rare. Used for color and passing harmony.

Heard in: Metal riffs, jazz (half-diminished ø7 chords in ii°7 – V – i), horror and tension film scores.

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