B Rock 'n' Roll — Viola

B Rock 'n' Roll is 6 notes to the octave (blues family), drawn here along the Viola's CGDA strings with every B named, so home is findable from any finger.

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.

Because the strings climb in fifths, one hand position covers a wide span of the fingerboard — four fingers, a fifth of range per string, and the same finger pattern repeating across every neighbouring pair. Learning a scale here is mostly learning WHICH position it wants and where the shifts fall.

Open-string drones: one of the Viola's 4 open strings belongs to B Rock 'n' Roll — the D string (the third) — so it can ring beneath the line as a fixed reference.

The D string is a chord tone of the B tonic triad, so it stays consonant against every degree of the scale.

The C string, the G string and the A string sit outside B Rock 'n' Roll: stop them rather than let them sound through the phrase.

Play it slowly with a long bow, one note to a stroke, and listen for the notes that pull sharp or flat against the open C and A. Intonation on this instrument is a conversation with the open strings — nothing on the fingerboard decides it for you.