C Rock 'n' Roll, E9 Pedal Steel Side

6 notes to the octave, mapped below onto this reader's E9 neck, with every C called out. Those markers are the useful part mid-bar: a chart moves under you, and the thing you need is where the root went — not where the pattern started.

Major pentatonic with a b3 rubbed against the natural 3 — bright and bouncy with a bluesy smirk. Playful, swinging, and built for boogie riffs.

Heard in: Fifties rock, rockabilly, boogie-woogie, Chuck Berry-style riffs, and jump blues.

Between two numbers the bar comes to rest and the pedals keep working: a pedal or lever raises a ringing string into the next note of a line, so a scale here marks where the bar can stop and which of its notes a bend can reach from there.

Play it slowly against the audio until the bar position stops being a bar position, then take it to a chart counted in C and let the numbers pick their own notes out of it.