Dobro Fills With D Minor Pentatonic

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

D Minor Pentatonic runs 5 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.

Gritty, bluesy, and direct — five notes with no half steps, so each one lands with attitude over a minor or dominant chord. The sound of rock and blues lead playing.

Heard in: Blues, rock, hard rock, metal, funk, and soul solos — the first scale most lead players learn and the one they never leave.

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.