F Whole Half Diminished — C6 Pedal Steel
Every note of F Whole Half Diminished as a bar position on the C6 neck's ten strings, pedals up — the root ringed each time it recurs, and a button that plays the run.
F Whole Half Diminished is 8 notes to the octave (symmetric family), drawn here across the C6 neck's ten strings with every F marked, so home stays visible from anywhere in the pattern.
Unstable and eerie — alternating whole and half steps, with the b3, b5, and 6 spelling a diminished seventh chord in every direction. Ominous, symmetrical, and unresolved.
Heard in: Diminished seventh chords in classical and jazz, horror and suspense scores, Bartok and Stravinsky, and neoclassical metal.
On a pedal steel a scale is mostly played with the bar moving, one or two notes at a time, and the pedals supply the notes a bar position lacks. These maps show the neck with the pedals up, so what they light is the ground every pedal move starts from.
Work it in one position before you work it up the neck. A bar that lands a hair short of the marker sounds flat on every string it covers, and the ear hears that long before the run is fast.