Dobro Fills With C Persian

Where C Persian lies on Dobro's neck, and the fill it feeds.

C Persian runs 7 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's GBDGBD neck with every C 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.

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.

Play it slowly against the audio until the shape stops being a shape, then take it to a song in C and let the melody pick its own notes out of it.