Scales — Dobro

Pick a root and one of 24 types and see it as it lies on this chair's neck, roots marked throughout. Three of these carry most of the repertoire; the rest are for the tune nobody warned you about.

A dobro break is slid, not fretted: the bar travels to each note, so a scale here is a list of places the bar may stop on the way — and on open-G strings, the stops that ring against an open string are the ones the melody keeps coming back to.

Nobody in a circle plays a scale. They play a melody, and when the melody runs out they play the notes around it — which is what a scale map is actually for.