G Spanish — Dobro

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

Fiery and exotic — the b2 presses against the root while the major 3rd keeps it from sounding plainly minor. Flamenco heat with a Middle-Eastern edge: dramatic, urgent, and passionate.

Heard in: Flamenco and Spanish classical guitar, klezmer and "Hava Nagila", Arabic and Jewish liturgical music, metal riffs, and the V chord of harmonic minor.

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