 Hi guys, this is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to explore the minor scale and look at a few things which you probably did not know about it, right? Maybe a few things which were left out from certain theory, text, books or manuals or guides or maybe, you know, you may find a few new things in this lesson. I'll also be revising and touching up some of the normal, commonly used questions or the commonly used approaches of composing music in minor. I, for one, I don't know why or how, but I tend to make a lot more music on the minor keys or the minor scales than I do on the major scales. I do use major a bit, but then I combine it a lot with minor. For those of you who've heard some of my songs, you'll probably have an idea by now, right? So I'm going to give you a few approaches to just make your minor music sound a bit more interesting and to give you some foundational aspects as well if you did not know them. So for this lesson, I'm just going to take the minor scale which is used more commonly in music, right? The harmonic minor. So that would be a great way to remember that would be a minor third which anyways is a common thing for all the minor scales, right? You go, that just makes it minor. That is the minor tonality. You need that minor third. And then in addition to that minor third, you could have a play between the sixth and the seventh. So for the harmonic minor, you leave the sixth as flat, not natural. That would make it maybe Dorian or melodic minor. That would be so that's the minor third, perfect fifth, minor sixth. And then we have that natural or the major seven. So harmonic minor in a nutshell, flat three, flat six, normal seven. Normal meaning major seventh as per what the major scale was. So let's first look at the basic harmony of the harmonic minor scale. We look at the triads. We look at some of the extensions which I think are really cool. And then we'll piece them together and perhaps unlock some secrets which you did not know along the way. And if you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe to our channel. Hit that bell for notifications. We do quite a few lessons on our YouTube channel. We do theory. We do ear training. We go live quite often. And we also do normal piano technique exercises and stuff. So hit the subscribe, hit the bell, very important. And most of our lessons, rather I think all of our lessons in recent times have been supplemented by my handwritten notes as well as notation when we need it. In some instances, even backing tracks and other resources. So all of this stuff is waiting for you on our Patreon page. So do head over and be part of that community as well for a very nominal monthly subscription. Right. So let's get cracking with the lesson. So the triads of C harmonic minor. Remember I've chosen the harmonic minor scale in this demonstration, not the natural or the Dorian or melodic, the harmonic minor. So the first chord will be C minor. That's your home bass if you will. You could extend this chord with a minor major seven. That's a very, very interesting chord. Right. For a harmonic minor, you have that maybe for a natural minor or Dorian, you have a more minor seven or more normal sound. But for a harmonic minor, you have this even at the D. Okay. You get that even in the melodic domain. Okay. So that's your one minor. Now the two is a diminished chord, which in this case is D diminished, but you can extend the chord by doing quite a few things really. You can extend it by going, you can go minor seventh, flat five, or we also call that as a half diminished or you can go diminished seventh. So just remember the second chord could either be a diminished, normal diminished triad, or if you want to extend the chord using sevens, you go minor, minor seventh, flat five or diminished seven, very common chord, minor seventh, flat five, diminished seventh. So that's about your two. Now the third is very interesting in the harmonic minor. The third is an augmented triad, which we don't really have in the major scale or the natural minor, right? That's your augmented chord. And if you add some more mystery to it, you can add an augmented major seventh, which you can, I guess, use here and there. You may, you may not want to use it all the time. It just sounds very, very weird and mysterious or dreamy, you know. Just know that you have the augmented chord. And I'll tell you what you can do on the three as well to make it a bit more normal in this lesson. Okay, coming to the four. I love the four for the minor, the C harmonic minor. You'll have four minor, but then you can extend that by doing four minor sixth, which will be root minor third, perfect fifth major sixth. You can also do like a minor seven, or build something around that. You can build a motif, resolve it back to the tonic. Beautiful embellishments for the four minor. Okay, so we do that quite a bit. You can also make the four a lot more colorful, a lot more grander, you know. A lot more mysterious, especially with that sixth. Okay, coming to the five. The five is a dominant chord. So usually music theory and just general compositional discussions will always do stuff around the five. You can have a lot of chordal color, but harmonic minor already gives you that color. You don't have to leave the scale. So you can have your five normal. In this case, G major, you can have a G seventh, G B D F, okay, but you can also do a few things. You can even sharpen the five to get an augmented sound. So this is also called as a G seven, sharp five dominant chord with a raised five. The five has gone up. You can also call it an augmented seventh. Another great way to use the dominant chord in the same scale, you know, is to add the flat nine, which is actually the A flat. But we call it a flat nine because it's with respect to the G root. So you do G B D F A flat. That's what the dominant does very often. It resolves to the tonic. So you have a lot of options for the dominant. Another nice thing with the dominant is you could do a seven sus four. Again, diatonic G C D F and then resolve it to the dominant seventh and then tonic. Okay, let's go through the dominant chord once more. So you have G dominant seventh, augmented seventh, seven flat nine. And then you could do a sus four sus four with a flat nine rather seven sus four with a flat nine back to the minor. Okay. So that's the dominant lot of options there, right? Coming to the six. Generally, the textbooks are going to say six major, but you can also build a six minor. Okay. I'm going to elaborate on that a little shortly. Okay. And finally, the seventh will be a diminished chord with an additional extension that would be a diminished seventh, D diminished seventh. Another thing you'll realize is diminished sevens are kind of inversions of each other. Again, I'm going to elaborate this in the lesson. So I just wanted to start our lesson like that to kind of give you all the chord possibilities of C minor in this instance, C harmonic minor. What you would want to do is start with the triads. If you don't know the triads already and do check out the charts, do check out the notes which I've provided. It'll help you. And one thing I like to communicate to my students in general is always write down your scales in circles. Don't write them in lines because circles will just help you find thirds, triads, intervals, chords in general a lot better. So write it in a circle and then build your music or your chords accordingly. Okay. Now let's look at things which you may not have heard or used with respect to the harmonic minor. The first thing is the mystery of the sixth chord. Okay. This is something I found out a bit late in my journey of playing on the minor scale in general. What I found is, well, the one is minor. You can't change that. But if you do a progression and you go one to the sixth, it sounds very uplifting, very epic, very brave, right? Right? But in this same scale, you could just slide your major third of A flat down by one and you get a minor version. So you could take the same sequence, very harmonic minor, right? So this gives you a little bit more, you know, diabolic sound, a little bit more evilish kind of sound, right? A painful. Let me just show you a few possibilities with melody and try and weave in something. Let's see where it can go. Right? So that minor kind of feels a bit unresolved when you do major, it just lifts the music. Okay, so that's just one thing you may not have known when you normally write down the triads of the harmonic minor. I'm also telling you this because it's something even I did not know. So I think in one of my songs which I composed, we tried to analyze it in a class and then students were like, you know, where did that chord come from? And then we figured, oh, yeah, it's actually from the same old minors. So the harmonic minor is giving you so many things, right? So many options to a point that, I guess, that's why they called it harmonic in the first place. You know, you have so many harmony options which the major scale doesn't really give us. Okay, moving on to the second thing which I think which is really great for the harmonic minor, the dominant chord. As I mentioned earlier, you have a lot of possibilities for that dominant chord, right? In even in the major scale. Now, instead of using any altered tones, stones which are out of the scale or as we say tensions or, you know, the sharp nines and all of that stuff, you find that a lot of these alterations are within the key itself. So if you take your dominant chord, G major at the dominant seventh, you have various possibilities. First off, well, you can just do a G dominant seventh, bring it back to C minor. You could also do this. You could add the G dominant seventh, add the flat nine. Why is it flat nine? Because with respect to G dominant seventh, flat nine, that flat nine pulls itself stronger to a C minor. So it's like two very strong pulls. You have the B going to C. You even have the flat nine wanting to go to G. So it's a very strong magnet. So now what you could also do, you could also do the seven sus four root, which is G, C, D, F. Resolve it to the dominant. Yeah. And then back to tonic. So you have a lot of variations on that dominant chord. Another nice way to use the dominant chord, we call it dominant because the fifth note or the fifth degree will be you can add an augmentation. That means you sharpen the five. What was the normal five D sharpen the five and keep the dominant seventh there. Resolve very well. So what I wanted to share is the dominant chord is always the chord you want to play around with. You want to add a lot of colors. And when you think of it melodically, your melody also will adapt and it has to adapt because you're coloring the harmony so much that the harmony has to inspire a new melodic twist. So maybe you could do, maybe your melody could be like this. Okay. Why did I, why did that work? Because flat nine normal root back to tonic. So my melody was or you could go you could keep that E flat ringing and thus you get like a augmented augmented seventh sound. Another trick when you're composing melodies in the harmonic minor scale, when you do dominant going to tonic, you can actually use it in a bluesy context. You can use it with the minor blues scale. Can weave that in, for example, what I'm singing is on the blues scale, but the chords are coming from some other scale. In this case, the harmonic minor, right? So the B flat becomes a passing note. Very exciting chord. So when you use the dominant chord, use it with all the colors, use it with all the extensions. Also remember that you can, you need to compose with the dominant and the tonic. And when that happens, a lot of possibilities exist. Like I just told you, you can, because you have two chords in the context, you can weave in the blues scale as well. You can bring in the blues scale and color it up even further, right? So that was about the dominant chord. That was the second thing I wanted to share about the harmonic minor. Let's now move on. So another exciting way to use the harmonic minor is to treat it like what I call as the hybrid minor. Okay, so with a hybrid minor context, you could look at it as a minor scale with the bare minimum requirement being that it has to have a minor third. And it does not need, necessarily need to have any of the exotic intervals as I call it, which in this case will be flat two and the tritone. Beautiful intervals, but let's not call it a hybrid minor. Let's, otherwise then everything will be part of the minor. So I'm ignoring, what am I ignoring? Obvious signals will be flat two because it's exotic in nature. Tritone because it's very, very unique in sound and I'm ignoring the major third because minor, what differentiates minor from major, the third. So the first five notes are in the bank but what makes it hybrid would be what you can do with the sixth and the seventh. So that's natural, that's harmonic. So what you could do is just look at the seventh flat sometimes and the seven natural sometimes and for the most part you use the flat six because the flat six is contained in both the popular minors. The natural minor and the harmonic it's there. In some cases you want to, you know, make it a bit more exciting by make it a natural six. That would make it Dorian but let's leave that out for this discussion. I would love to do another video on its own on the Dorian. So we will do that shortly. So you go natural minor, harmonic minor. So if you consider yourself to be in the C minor scale, you could perhaps look at it as a hybrid minor and say, you know, here and there I'll change my music by bringing in the seven flat instead of the, that mysterious seven natural. So that gives birth to two chords you could try out in your composition. The first is the three. I would immediately consider messing a bit with the three because naturally in the harmonic minor world, the three becomes augmented which for most singer songwriter stuff becomes almost unusable unless you're writing like oh darling by the Beatles, which has that chord at the very beginning, right? Anyway, so the augmented third or the augmented chord at the three flat could be replaced by just a normal major. So that came from the natural minor because of the addition of the B flat, which is the flat seven. So you could do, but to make it a bit more ambient and less obvious, you could make it like a major seventh. Just makes it a bit more just ambient. It's just like a passer by chord, you know? So I'm still on C minor. You could even kind of color it up by playing a major sixth. So the borrowed chord will be E flat major seventh or E flat major sixth. Let's see how we can bring this into context. Very harmonic minor. That was the E flat. You can move from there to the F minor dominant. Let's do that again. E flat dominant back to the minor. Just remember we can add these borrowed chords from other scales or just treat it as the hybrid minor. That may be a new approach for you to consider. Okay, another nice chord which can be built because of the hybrid minor could be a B flat major. Because you're telling yourself C, okay, I want to change that B to B flat momentarily. So you get a B flat major and you can dress it up with a major sixth. So another nice way to do this stuff is play the sixth major and you get a sixth flat, seventh flat going to tonic. You're still on the minor scale, harmonic minor, but this is a more braver sound. Now go to the harmonic dominant. So I'm bringing both in A flat major, G dominant, E flat, the borrowed, back to harmonic minor. See how I'm playing around with that? It's like you're considering the harmonic minor and the natural minor as just one scale, like one big scale of lots of harmonic possibilities. So that was another way to use the minor scale which hopefully you find interesting. What I call as the hybrid minor concept. Let's move on. Right. So another thing I'd like to explore or I'd like to urge you to explore would be how a chord can just sound colorful versus a chord to sound very mysterious or very tense as well or very different or very unique. So if you consider the four chord of the harmonic minor scale, if you were to look at its extensions, you can go F minor seventh. E flat is the minor seventh of F or you can do minor six. So you see this scale is incredible in the sense that it gives you like a very normal sound, F minor seventh. And it gives you a very mysterious, very movie theme, like very James Bond like sound. And both these sounds came from the same scale. So you could use both. So that's something cool which you could do over the four minor. You can make it a minor seventh or a minor six. We all know how much you can color the dominant chord that I've explained earlier. Another interesting chord you could consider coloring is the two. Okay. If you take the two, you could either do it as, well, by default, it's two diminished. Now you can color it with a diminished seventh, which is a B on the top. Just to recap or just to revise with you, diminished seventh is like a major seventh minus two or a major seventh down a whole step. So that's what it is. Or you can look at it as a major sixth. So this according to me is a more normal sound, a more grounded sound. Yes, it doesn't sound stable, but it just sounds normal compared to the minor seven flat five, which again brings back that mystery, you know. So this will be again, you can use that together and finally resolve to tonic. So it's just something to realize. And if you look at it in a hybrid context, you can look at an a system where you play even the tonic, which is minor. You could do the normal embellishment, which is the minor seventh, or you could do the harmonic minor embellishment, which is a lot more like I keep saying, James Bondish. So you have that mysterious sound and you have like a normal colorful sound contained within the same scale, contained within the harmonic minor scale. So that's just something I wanted you to consider and you can do a lot on the six. You can do so many colors on each chord of this scale, which you need to consider. So always write it down before you play it and things get a lot more easier and I've given you a tip earlier to write it in a circle. I would definitely stress on that. Moving to the last thing, which I wanted to communicate to you in terms of really diving into the harmonic minor, it's the diminished chord. So the diminished chord, there are various extensions of the chord, but the more commonly used one is the diminished seventh. So if you take the diminished seventh, it's just a collection of minor thirds. Minor third, minor third, another minor third. So you put three of them together. That's a diminished seventh. And you may argue, can I do four minor thirds? Well, you can't because it's a symmetric chord. It's going to eventually come back to where you started. What's another nice symmetric chord to consider the augmented chord? Okay, maybe more on that in another lesson. Okay, so you go diminished seventh and it's important to know or it's cool to know that diminished seventh chords are kind of inversions of each other. So you don't have to learn that many, which makes life actually a little easier. So if you take D diminished seventh, it is also F diminished seventh. It is also A flat diminished seventh. It is also B diminished seventh. So all of those chords, well are contained in the C harmonic minor scale, but it doesn't provide for a unique sound. So how do you make diminished sevenths usable, I guess? So one way is play the bass note a little lower. So then it becomes more obvious. A D bass, F bass, A flat bass. Now you have a value. Now you have a value for the chord. But if you keep them very close together, then they all kind of sound the same. So diminished seventh chords with different bass notes will give you a different personality for the chord. Okay, and a diminished seventh chord could also be a replacement or an add-on for a dominant chord. You know, you could do... So you could kind of try playing one of them and figure out a way to come to the tonic. So or the other one, D diminished. Now B is sticking on top. So maybe I'll use B in my melody. All roads lead to C minor. Now if I take F diminished seventh, then it resolves to the minor third there because that D inspires you with your melody. So that top note really helps you compose your melody. So let's now try something with the A flat diminished seventh. So start with the top one. All right, so if I'm not mistaken, hopefully I've come up with four melodies right now just using that one chord. Which has four inversions. So there's a huge value for practicing all the four versions of that one diminished seventh chord. So I just wanted to communicate that you have four diminished seventh chords in a harmonic minor scale. How do you make them really stand out, work on your bass, and the other is work on the top most note because when you hear music, the bass note changes the vibe of the music. While the top note is what's the most attractive or the most catchy note, or will end up being your melody note, whatever you're going to work on. Okay, so that's about the diminished seventh chord. I'm itching to say a lot more on the diminished seventh chord because there's so many other ways to use it, but definitely a few more lessons coming your way. Okay, so these were the five strategies, if you will, to work on your harmonic minor chops or to work on your compositional ability using the harmonic minor scale. Let's just go through them. The first thing is to remember that the six can be either six major or six minor and then come back to the tonic or go somewhere else. Just keep that in mind. The six can either be major or the minor. The second thing we looked at is there are so many strategies you can do with respect to the dominant chord. What is dominant again? Five. So you have so many colors and textures for that chord. You can do G seventh normal, then you can do G, G seven flat nine, G augmented seventh, G seven sus four, G seven sus four with the flat nine. You can build a progression literally just using the dominant chord. That's all you really need. Then what did we do? Then we looked at considering the harmonic minor more like a hybrid minor, where you can bring in that variety using both the sevenths, the major seventh as well as the minor seventh. Where did we go B or B flat? And because of the B flat, we ended up figuring out the fact that you can play an E flat major chord or a major seventh or a major sixth. You can even do stuff over your B flat. Make that a B flat major because you have B flat. Now that you're like, okay, it's a C minor scale with a B and a B flat. You know, something like that. That was our borrowed concept where or a hybrid minor concept. Then we looked at the distinction between color and mystery, right? Color is just kind of making something like a four chord more colorful. Otherwise it's just a vanilla chord, as I call it. It's just F minor, but color it with that E flat. But then I'm just trying to give you this different sonic classification where you have something colorful and you have something mysterious, okay? So yes, just that was our fourth strategy. And lastly, we've looked at the diminished seventh chord where the diminished seventh chords, there are four of them. You can use it to really inspire the movement to the tonic. It's like a dominant chord. You can also use it melodically by sticking out the top note, getting inspired by that, and then weaving a melody from there. Also change the bass notes and put them deep down. Otherwise you will not get the characteristic of it, okay? So lots to do with harmonic minor. I hope you found the lesson useful. I hope you enjoy the harmonic minor more after having watched this lesson and definitely write it down, practice it on many keys. I've given it to you on C harmonic minor which is a nice way to start I guess and then build from there, right? You have so many ways of exploring this scale. So I just wanted to try and put it all together or put in at least five of the top strategies which I think will work in music for you, right guys? Again, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. If you found the video useful, do consider giving it a like, share the lesson on your channels. Leave us a comment with stuff you'd want us to do in the future. Consider following us on Patreon where you can get all these notes in, you know, as well as notation whenever we put that out and don't forget to subscribe, hit the bell if you haven't already. Cheers, see you in the next one.