Dobro: Scales for a Country Fill

Pick a root and one of 24 types and see it as it lies on this chair's neck, roots marked throughout. Three of these carry most of the repertoire; the rest are for the song nobody warned you about.

The dobro slides into notes rather than fretting them cleanly, so a scale here is a target list for the bar more than a set of stops — the slide finds the pitch, the scale says which pitch to find.

A fill is not a scale played straight through. It is a handful of notes pulled from one, timed to land before the vocal comes back in — which is what a scale map is actually for.