B Harmonic Minor — Dobro

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

Dark and dramatic. The raised 7th pulls hard toward the tonic, and the wide step from the b6 up to it gives the scale an exotic, almost Middle-Eastern tension.

Heard in: Classical minor-key harmony, neoclassical metal (Yngwie Malmsteen), flamenco-tinged rock, klezmer, and Balkan melodies.

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