Music Theory - Minor Keys And Scales

If you already when through the topic about the 'key signatures', you are now aware that the key of a song is determine by what major scale the melody is based upon, for example; a song that start with C major will most likely be using the notes from a C major scale more frequently than notes that don't belong to that scale. This however brings us to another question, what if a song is written in a minor key, what scale will it be using. The answer to this question is the 'Minor Scale'.

Minor scales are build upon the 6th degree of a major scale. To properly understand this, let's revisit our C major scale:

Counting up from 'C', the 6th degree would be the note 'A', so in the key of C major, an 'A Minor Scale' exist. What this basically means, is that both scales uses the exact same notes but only starting from a different degree of the scale. Since both scale shares the same notes, they are referred to as being 'relatives', so in this case, the relative minor of C major is A minor.

When a minor scale is build using the notes of it's relative major, it is describes in musical terms as being a 'Natural Minor'. On the guitar, a relative minor to any major scale can be found three frets lower from the root note.

Getting back to our question, a song that is written in a minor key, will basically be using the notes of it's relative major, for example; songs written in the key of A minor, will basically be using notes of the C major scale.

Now for the tricky part, apart from using notes of it's relative major, songs written in a minor key will often used an altered version of the natural minor scale to establish the center of gravity of the song. They are two of this altered version and they are; 'harmonic Minor' and 'Melodic Minor'.

Harmonic and Melodic Minor Scale

The 'Harmonic Minor Scale' is constructed by raising the seventh degree of the natural minor scale a semitone higher. So sticking with the A minor scale as an example, here's what it look's like:

As you can see, the note 'G' in the natural minor scale is raised a semitone higher to 'G#' in the harmonic minor scale.

Let's move on to the melodic minor scale. For this scale, instead of raising just the seventh degree of the scale, the sixth degree of the scale is raised a semitone higher as well, like this:

Altering the natural minor scale this way, created a different set of chord sequence that established a pull to the root chord even more. Below is a list of chord sequence created from these three scales:

Based around the 'A Minor Scale'

(A Natural Minor)
1. A Minor
2. B Diminished
3. C Major
4. D Minor
5. E Minor
6. F Major
7. G Major

If you wish, you can now figure out the chord sequence to other minor keys based on these formulas. This is easy to do since the order of the chord sequence on all three scales will stays the same for all minor keys.

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