A. Kori Hill

If you are taking private music lessons, your teacher probably has you playing lots of scales. Real talk: that was my least favorite thing to play. I wanted to play my Vivaldi and Mozart, not notes in a row up and down the fingerboard; it was so boring! 

But eventually, I learned that these boring notes in a row helped me with my intonation and opened my ear to other harmonies other than the diatonic major scale. Today, we’re going to talk about three types of minor scales that you have or will learn at some point: natural minor, harmonic minor, and melodic minor. 

Natural minor scales share the same key as their relative major scales. So, A natural minor has the same key as C major; B flat natural minor has the same key as D flat major; B natural minor has the same key as D major. 

So, if we’re playing an E natural minor scale, you’ll play E–F#–G–A–B–C–D–E. In terms of notes, you’re using the same pitches that would appear if you were playing a G major scale. But instead of starting on G, you’re starting on E. 

Harmonic minor scales introduce the raised leading tone. In E natural minor, we have E-F#-G-A-B-C-D-E, which gives us a whole step between the leading tone and octave. In E harmonic minor, we raise the leading tone, D, to introduce the tension that causes the sound to want to resolve back to the tonic, E. 

Play E-F#-G-A-B-C-D#-E and see how different it sounds from the natural minor version. Some folks say this sounds Middle Eastern/Arabian, though actual Middle Eastern scales, called maqams, are much more complex. 

Melodic minor is really cool because it combines elements of the minor scale’s parallel major with the natural minor. In melodic minor, you raise the subdominant and leading tone on the way up and lower them on the way down. 

So, E melodic minor goes E–F#–G–A–B–C#–D#–E on the way up and E–D–C–B–A–G–F#–E on the way down. While ascending, we’re trying to get towards E major, though we don’t have the G# that we’d be playing in E major. And while descending, we return to natural minor. 

When it comes to Roman numerals to represent chords in minor keys, there are a lot of lowercase and diminished symbols. All tonic chords in minor keys are represented with an “i,” to indicate that it’s a minor key. So, if you want to label an E minor chord with a Roman numeral, you use i. 

If you’re labeling the leading tone chord in E natural minor, you’ll use vii° because the chord is D#–F#–A. Play D# and A together. Notice that they don’t quite settle like D and A do; that’s because they’re a diminished fifth apart. A diminished fifth is a smaller interval than D and A, which is a perfect fifth. The ° symbol indicates this interval’s diminished status and is consistent across the leading tone chord in natural, harmonic, and melodic minor scales. 

Now for the dominant chord, sometimes it’s “v” and sometimes it’s “V.” If you’re playing a dominant chord in E natural minor: B–D–F#, you’d label it as v, because B to D is a minor third. But if you’re playing a dominant chord in E harmonic or melodic minor, you’ll get B–D#–F#, and because the first third is a major third, you label it as V. 

Go through other chords in E minor and other minor scales and see which ones are minor, major, or diminished, and think about how they help you understand the different types of harmonic color you can use when composing.