Dobro Fills With D Gypsy Minor

Where D Gypsy Minor lies on Dobro's neck, and the fill it feeds.

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

Harmonic minor with a raised 4th — two wide, yearning steps (b3 to #4, b6 to 7) give it a smoldering, theatrical intensity. Dark, exotic, and full of drama.

Heard in: Hungarian and Romani folk, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, gypsy jazz, klezmer, and neoclassical metal.

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