A Gypsy Major — Dobro

A Gypsy Major runs 7 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's GBDGBD neck with every A marked, because what you need mid-break is not the pattern — it is where the root is when the chord changes under you. A is one of the four keys a circle calls, so this one comes up.

Brash and colorful — a #2 crushed against the major 3rd and a #4 give it a Lydian-dominant swagger with a Romani twist. Bold, spicy, and unpredictable.

Heard in: Hungarian and Romani folk, Bartok and Liszt, gypsy-jazz flourishes, and fusion lines over dominant chords.

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.

Play it slowly against the audio until the shape stops being a shape, then take it to a tune in A and let the melody pick its own notes out of it.