E9 Pedal Steel Fills With G Persian

Where G Persian lies on E9 Pedal Steel's neck, and the fill it feeds.

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

Intensely exotic — two half-step clusters (b2 against the root, b5 against the 4) and a raised 7th make it the most dramatic of the world scales. Mysterious, ornate, and tense.

Heard in: Persian and Middle-Eastern-flavored melodies, film scoring for desert and ancient settings, and exotic metal and progressive-rock riffs.

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