Dobro Fills With G# Blues

Where G# Blues lies on Dobro's neck, and the fill it feeds.

G# Blues runs 6 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's GBDGBD 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.

The minor pentatonic with a b5 "blue note" wedged in — that one extra note adds grit, tension, and a sly, vocal quality. Tough, expressive, and unmistakably bluesy.

Heard in: Blues, rock, jazz, rhythm and blues, and boogie-woogie — Delta and Chicago blues, Hendrix, Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan.

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