F Chords — Dobro

All 62 qualities on the root F, in 10 families, drawn for this chair. A circle will only ever call four or five of them, but the tune that finally gets called will use the sixth, and this is where you look it up.

F is outside all four keys a bluegrass circle habitually calls, which usually means somebody capoed to it or the tune came from somewhere else.

The dobro chair owns the answering voice. Face-up in open G, a chord here is not a shape to grab but a fret to lay the bar across, or a short slant of it, and the slide into that fret is half the sound — which is why the seat waits for a hole in the vocal rather than filling every bar.