D Major, E9 Pedal Steel Side

7 notes to the octave, mapped below onto this reader's E9 neck, with every D 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.

Bright, resolved, and stable. The foundation of Western tonal music and the most common mode in pop, classical, folk, and jazz.

Heard in: Pop, classical, country, folk, gospel — the default major tonality of Western music.

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 D and let the numbers pick their own notes out of it.