E Minor Pentatonic — Dobro

E Minor Pentatonic runs 5 notes to the octave. Below it is laid onto this chair's GBDGBD neck with every E marked, because what you need mid-break is not the pattern — it is where the root is when the chord changes under you.

Gritty, bluesy, and direct — five notes with no half steps, so each one lands with attitude over a minor or dominant chord. The sound of rock and blues lead playing.

Heard in: Blues, rock, hard rock, metal, funk, and soul solos — the first scale most lead players learn and the one they never leave.

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