Minor Scales - Natural, Harmonic, and Melodic

hey guys so i thought i'd do a lesson on minor scales now these can be confusing because in a lot of cases when you're in a minor key you're going to wind up switching from a natural minor scale to a harmonic minor scale to in some cases a melodic minor scale so it's a lot to keep track of and i figured we just lay these different scales out and look at you know what they are and why there's these different scales to deal with now as always check the description for things you're going to want to know before doing this lesson but to start with we will look at the natural minor scale now two questions here one why is it called the natural minor and two what's wrong with it like why do we need these other scales in the first place now this should be review at this point but a minor scale looks like this you start on a note you go over a whole step it gives you your second note half step gives you your third note whole step whole step half step whole step whole step that's your pattern for a minor scale so if we did this on d we'd start on d go over a whole step half step whole there's your d minor just to compare a major scale would look like this start on a note whole step whole step half step step step little step so on d just like that now the reason why we call this a natural liner is because if you take a major scale and you kind of rearrange the intervals you can get that natural minor pattern now i did a whole video on this that goes way in depth so if you want to dive down that rabbit hole you can but for this lesson we're going to skip ahead to the important question what's wrong with this natural minor scale now in order to understand the issues with the minor scale we need to look at the major scale first now the major scale is an excellent scale there is a reason why it's so popular and a lot of that is because it has what's called a leading tone the leading tone means that note number seven we'll go ahead and label these but note number seven is right underneath note number one and when that happens you call that a leading tone and what that means is that that note number seven it builds tension and it likes to resolve into one so here's the here's the d major scale again that note right there that's the leading tone it very nicely builds a little bit of tension and it resolves into that note one now the minor scale doesn't have that note number seven is actually a whole step away from note number one so it sounds like this and it doesn't do that same thing it doesn't build that tension and resolve into one now when i play that scale you might think it doesn't really sound that bad you know i can still hear d is the center note but that's because i'm actually starting on a d and i'm ending on a d if i kind of rearrange the notes a little bit like say i don't start on d and i just play a little melody it's very hard to tell which note is actually the root note it kind of drifts around a little bit as opposed to like the d major scale it's very obvious that d is note number one you know that strong center note so that's pretty much the issue that's why we're going to wind up using the harmonic minor and even the melodic minor that's pretty much the root of this whole thing so let's start looking at the harmonic minor and i'm going to rewrite these so i have a little more room okay so here's the major scale here's a natural minor in order to fix that issue with you know no leading tone in the natural minor we create the harmonic minor scale now it is almost exactly the same as the natural minor with one difference so for the whole beginning of the scale it's identical except we're just gonna take note number seven and slide it over so it becomes a leading tone it's nothing more than that we just take the note slide it over and now we have a leading tone and that's the harmonic minor so it sounds like this right up until the very end it's exactly the same as the d natural minor it just has that leading tone and now we don't have that problem at all that note d it's very obvious that that's the root note we have a very strong tension resolution sound so you might think cool the harmonic minor solves all my problems i'll just use that from now on and forget about the natural minor but it's actually not that simple and there's a reason why a lot of music actually switches back and forth between these so to start with you might actually not want that strong tension resolution sound all the time in fact it can actually sound kind of cheesy if you use it too much and this is a problem with the major scale in fact a lot of kind of new musicians they'll run into this you can write a piece of music and think man this sounds kind of cheesy why is that and in a lot of cases it's because there's too much of that tension resolution like say we're playing in g major this sound is very strong and it stands out a lot and it can just sound kind of cheesy and if you use the harmonic minor too much you can wind up with that same issue but there's more reasons than just that one of the things you do with scales all the time is you play notes together and you create chords so in the case of the natural minor if we're going to take these notes and make chords out of them we might start on note number one and in order to make chords you take a note and then you you skip one of the scale degrees and you go to the next one and that you sort of stack that note on top and then you do that again you want it with this one so in practice if we're using d minor we start on a d go up to this note that becomes the second note of the chord then we go up to this note note number five and we wind up with a d minor now i have a video on this too if you want to learn more about that but for now there's your d minor chord and that's great that's wonderful and if we took the harmonic minor scale we could do the same exact thing and we would get a d minor chord but we could go further we could take you know the d and the f and the a and we could stack another one on top use that as c and we get a very nice d minor 7 so that's great too if you did that with the harmonic minor you would wind up with this chord okay now this is what's called a major minor seventh chord or sorry minor major seventh chord and there's nothing wrong with this chord but it's a very uncommon chord and it has kind of a weird sound to it it's usually not something you want when you're just trying to harmonize the notes in your scale so in most cases if you're stacking notes together building up chords you're going to use the notes from the natural minor you'll only use notes from the harmonic minor when you want that tension resolution sound so this is kind of still the default scale and this is something you use for a specific purpose here's another example if we took note number three and stacked this into a chord so in the case of d it'd be an f major chord if we were using the harmonic minor scale we would get this sound which is an augmented chord which again is a cool chord but not always something you want so you get some weird things when you start harmonizing notes from the harmonic minor now on the other hand sometimes the harmonic minor scale will make chords that you really want so in the case of the natural minor if we try to build chord number five by starting on well in the case of d we'd be starting on note a but if we turn that into a chord we get this is an a minor chord great chord but if we do that same thing in the harmonic minor scale so we start a note number five and then this second note is going to be raised up that's our leading tone that's the whole reason we made this scale to begin with but that means that the c becomes c sharp right you wind up with an a major chord this chord really because it includes that leading tone it has a tension that wants to resolve into that d minor chord you can hear that it's a very strong sound it's really the same idea as using note number seven to build tension and resolve into one chord five because it includes note number seven it has that same tendency so what that means is that the harmonic minor scale if we use that instead of the natural minor chord five becomes a major chord and the reason why that's so important is because that chord now has that leading tone it builds tension and it resolves back into chord one just like that and in a lot of cases that's something you want in your minor key otherwise you don't get that strong tension resolution sound so that's the purpose of the harmonic minor now you can notice just from the way this looks when it's drawn out that there is something kind of weird about the harmonic minor it has this huge gap between note number six and note number seven it's actually farther apart than any note in the major scale or the natural minor and it does sound kind of strange right there now a lot of people like that sound i think it sounds pretty cool but it's very distinct and sometimes you want that sound in your music other times you don't i mean it really stands out a lot so the only way around that to get rid of that big gap that has such a distinct sound to it is to take note number six and slide that one up look at that so that eliminates that big gap between note number six and note number seven but it leaves note number seven where it is and that gives us that leading tone sound so that's what's called the melodic minor melodic minor so if you draw out the melodic minor it looks almost exactly the same as the harmonic minor except the note number six is scooted over now at this point this scale is actually really similar to the major scale you know since we've scooted over note 6 and note 7 that sort of makes that match up with with a major scale the only difference now is that note number three is still lowered if we took note number three and raised it we'd have a major scale so this scale actually ends up sounding very major-ish here it is again the only part that's you know the minor scale is that note number three now here's what's weird about this melodic minor scale in most classical music and this is what they'll teach you if you go you know to school and learn classical style music they'll play the scale like if you start from the the bottom and play up the scale it works just like this melodic minor but when you go back down you actually lower these two notes again and you sort of revert back to playing the natural minor now here's the logic behind that the whole reason for the harmonic minor scale in the first place was to get that you know tension resolution sound we got that by raising that seventh note so it has that you know leading tone effect and then the reason to use the melodic minor was because there's this kind of weird gap between note number six and note number seven like that so we'll raise note number six to cover that up but if we're playing down the scale then we're not going from note number seven to note number one we're going backwards so it's not number one to note number seven denote number six right so that note 7 to note 1 that tension resolution that's not happening here because we're going the opposite direction so there's not really any need to have that you know note number seven right behind note number one so when you're going down you might as well just switch back to the natural minor now here's the thing that was kind of the style in classical music but there are plenty of examples of composers using the melodic minor scale in the opposite direction so it does happen and in jazz music they don't usually think of the melodic minor that way they just use a melodic minor up and down so today in the modern world do whatever you like it doesn't have to be that way but just realize that that's kind of the traditional use of the melodic minor scale so that's the rundown of why we have these three different scales now i know this can be complicated but it's also a really good opportunity to do some cool creative things i mean you can use these different scales and get all different sounds out of them whereas you don't always have those same options in a major queue so i think that's it for this one please deposit your questions and comments down below check out my patreon campaign if you want to help support the channel and thanks for watching i will see you in the next one huh oh

Channel: Michael New

Views: 1,134,102

Keywords: minor scale, harmonic minor, melodic minor, music lesson, music theory

Id: Q7WqKpD7w4Q

Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2015