 Hi everyone, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to just have a rundown, a very detailed discussion and breakdown and summarizing the theory, all aspects of the minor scales. Now, the way I look at the minor scales may be slightly different because I look at all of them and I think all of them have a certain use case in terms of your harmony, what you compose and the vibe and the theme you want to bring to your music. So basically, we are going to look at the minor scales. We are not going to really look at playing it up and down like how it's normally done. If you're interested in that aspect, we have videos on our members only YouTube portal and our website, which you can access. This is mainly just to show you the theory behind it. There are going to be quite a few notes which supplement this lesson well, so you may want to check it out on our Patreon, which is available for download. So before we get cracking with the lesson, it'll be awesome if you could hit that bell and subscribe if you haven't already, share the video with your friends, give the video a like, that'll be very cool and leave us a comment with what you thought about this lesson and what you would like us to teach you in the future or any other way we can make this channel helpful for you moving forward. First off, let's look at how we form the scales and then we look at the uses and the harmony and what not. So if you take the key of C, this is C major, all the white notes. First of all, whenever we are forming any kind of minor scale, what I understand by minor is it's a scale which has a flat three or a minor third or a Komal G in Hindustani music. If this is the third, one, two, three, Sarega, you flatten that and you immediately get a minor vibe. What is a minor? It's a major minus one or you just remember it as a minor third, okay? And when you're learning intervals, I think it's very, very important to learn your thirds and your fifths and your fourths. I think if you start with that, yes, there are a lot of intervals in music. But if you can limit our study to just the thirds, you'll be fine for a start and everything else will graduate very easily. The perfect fifth, very important, perfect fourth, very important. You can learn that stuff with the circle of fifths. Perfect fifth is the clockwise neighbor. Perfect fourth is the counterclockwise neighbor of everything. The major third and the minor third, you just have to learn. And count like that. The moment you do things like this, it unfortunately means that you haven't learned it. One, two, three, four, five, C is fifth is G. No, that's not how you do it. C is fifth is G. Bang. You have to know it. So learn, invest your time and theoretical skills into getting the fifth, fourth, thirds which are major and minor. So C's major third is E. C's minor third is E flat. So any minor scale will have the flat which is the third, okay, or we just call it the minor third. Now a flat does not mean that it's a black note. That's what a few people get confused. Like for example, in the D major scale, the major third is F sharp. So when you flatten the F sharp, you're going to get F. So flattening is essentially going down a chromatic step. So chromatic steps going down, this is what I'm doing, chromatically going down. So that's the chromatic down thing. So of F sharp when it's getting flattened, sounds a bit weird, but F sharp when flattened becomes a white note F and that's the minor third of D. So minor third of C, D to the F, E to the G, F to the A flat, G to the B flat, A to the C, B to the D and over. And then you have C sharp to the E, D sharp to the F sharp, F sharp to the A, G sharp to the B, B flat to the D flat. These are all your minor thirds. Why I'm talking a lot about minor thirds because this entire lesson is about the minor scale. So all of the minor scales tend to have the minor thirds in them. So what else does the minor scale have which distinguishes or differentiates it from the major scale? One is the minor third and most of the minor scales, if you just take the major context, those are the five notes of the major scale. If you just flatten the third, it just starts sounding minor. Check that out and immediately you could build your home chord as a minor chord and contrast that a lot from its major, which is that immediately you've set a base as minor. So with minor scales, the way I like to remember them is you mess with the six and the seventh degree. The six in the case of the major, the four and five we leave alone, the six will be major sixth, major seventh. So in the minor scale, that assortment could change with along with the flattened third. So remember, minor scale will need that flat three and then you mess with the six and the seven. So the standard minor scale which we learn is the natural minor, it is also a relation or we call it the relative minor with respect to the major, to some other major. So the natural minor will end up being, it's a major scale with a flat three as all minors have, then a flat six and a flat seven. Flat six is called a minor sixth, flat seven is called as a minor seventh. So natural minor, natural, I don't know why the word natural, but I guess it's derived from a major scale. It could have been a major scale. If you started C minor from E flat, that would be E flat major if you started it on E flat. So what is this whole relative major minor concept E flat major, you move up a sixth, you'll get C minor. So that's the relative minor and major combo and very important in music writing because you could do your verse to be minor and you could move to the major scale, which is the relative major maybe in the chorus and it just creates that impact. You'll have a song with a moving theme. The dynamics would be great when you're writing a song with lyrics as well. So C minor, C natural minor, one way to remember it is flat three, flat six, flat seven octave. What's the difference between that and major flat three, flat six, flat seven. Now coming to the harmonic minor, the harmonic minor will be flat three as usual, then the flat in six and the raise seven, they say, but I like to just call it the major seventh and I like to observe the fact that most of what we learn with scales is a two step or a one step sequence, two steps, one step, two steps, two steps, one step, but with the harmonic minor, it adds a three step motion or an augmented second interval or you can say minor third. So it makes it really incredible, very unique for harmony also. That's why I guess they've called it the harmonic minor scale is the number of chords you can have with this is a lot. I've done a video just on the harmonic minor scale. So we'll be putting that in the description. Check that out. So minor third, flat six, major seventh, that's your harmonic minor scale, okay. So beautiful sound, beautiful scale and the harmonic minor scale is not really related to any major scale. Like it's a very unique set of notes, especially because of that B major seven. So it makes it a very different unique scale. In fact, the harmonic minor itself will have its own modes. You can learn the modes of this scale. A mode is where you change this around and start from another note. Like for example, if you wanted to start on the D instead of the C, you get that mode, very different sound, very different vibe. So it's a beautiful scale, the harmonic minor and so are its modes. And moving forward, another minor scale is called the melodic minor. Now the melodic minor has two ways of forming it. One way is the jazz melodic minor, which keeps it simple. Major scale with a flat three over major scale with a flat three. So what does that mean? Then major sixth, major seven. There we go. Major scale with a flat three. Of course, major sixth, major seventh. But the classical way of doing it would be go up the melodic minor and go down the natural minor. Down the natural minor means when you go descending, you do flat seven, flat six and then whatever the natural minor has to offer. Melodic minor up, raise six, raise seventh, flat six, flat seven on the way down. Classical melodic minor, jazz melodic minor, just normal. And yeah, it's also good to know that the modes of the melodic minor also are their own scale. So you have modes of the major scale, modes of the harmonic minor and then modes of the melodic minor. Another minor scale I wanted to add to this party because it's not there in most other parties is what I call the Dorian scale, not what I call. It's what we all call the Dorian scale. But the Dorian is not called Dorian minor. It's just called the Dorian scale. Now, why I like to put Dorian in the minor category is because it shares a minor third with like all the other minor scales, right? Harmonic, melodic and natural. So the Dorian has a minor third. But what's cool about it is if you look at your permutations between the six and the seven, let's say you have major sixth, major seventh, minor sixth and minor seventh to deal with. The natural minor happens to be flat six, flat seven. The harmonic minor happens to be flat six, normal seven. The melodic minor happens to be major six, major seven. And then there's one more permutation left, right? Major sixth, minor seventh. So we've covered minor, minor. Then we've done minor major, which is the harmonic minor sixth, seven. We've done major, major, which is melodic minor. And what's left? We have major minor, which is Dorian. So that'll be the usual one, two, three, four, five. At the major sixth, flat seven, B flat and N. Right? So those are your four go-to minor scales, which we find very useful in music writing. Because the natural minor is very melancholic in nature. When you combine a three-flat and a six-flat, it just gives you a very melancholic, despair kind of feeling. But then it can also so easily sound hopeful. The harmonic minor is the more interesting scale. Because it can sound painful and it can sound very hopeful at the same time. Both the minors, in fact. But the harmonic minor gives you a lot more chordal options. The Dorian tends to sound more brave and more epic sometimes. The movie theme score, you know. While the melodic minor just has a very mystical vibe. Very ambient, very dreamy kind of sound. To start off with harmony with these four scales, what I would encourage you to do is just do the one, the four and the five chords. So to form the one, the four and the five chords, it's quite easy. You just start with the root. Write your scale in a neat round circle. So for example, if I start with the natural minor, C, D, E-flat, F, G, A-flat, B-flat, C. Write that in a neat round circle. And then what can happen is, C will be the one. F will be the four. G will be the five. And then you build triads built off the one, the four and the five. You could also invert those triads by going one, four. Inverting just means you make it closer and jumble the notes so that they're easy to play. So C minor, F minor, C minor, G minor. So this can be some nice harmonic movement in the left hand. You could play them in any order. Play one, four, one, five or one, five, one, four. You can play all these songs. That's the natural. So if you build it with the other minors, you'll realize that the harmonic minor will have a one minor, four minor and a G major or a five major. Harmonic minor is used a lot. It's like a very Indian minor scale and almost every classical piece you'll ever learn is pretty much on the harmonic minor, not really the natural minor. You have that harmonic minor thing in a lot of classical songs. So harmonic minor would be one minor, four minor, five major, which I like to play this way. This is a good voicing in the left hand. One, three, five for the tonic major one, minor one, sorry. You could do one, four, six for the predominant or the four minor and seven, four, five for the five major or the dominant chord. You could accompany yourself with these chords. Similarly, the melodic minor will be one minor as always, one will always be minor. Four will be major because of that major sixth and the five chord will be again major. So one minor, four major, five major and back to one minor. Dorian, I love doing the one minor, four major back to one and then the five, one, buddy. So those are the four go to minor scales which people use. I would say the Dorian is more common for movie music or film scores, you know, for war themes and the brave stuff out there. Natural minors for the more melancholic stuff. And for everything else, there's the harmonic minor. The harmonic minor is also used very often in salsa and Latin music in classical western music and even in Indian classical music and Indian film music. So harmonic minor, I guess, is very, very popular, probably as commonly used as even the major. So I pretty much covered what I wanted to talk about, but I want to leave you with a few other interesting scales which you could form, which you could call as minor. And what is my premise for calling something minor? The fact that it has that minor third interval, minor third, not the major third. So what you could now consider is to form what I call as exotic minor scale. So to get like an exotic sound out of the system, you could make the two as flat or you can make the four as sharp. So the four sharp gives you that tritone flavor and the two flat gives you that chaotic minor second or that Arabic flavor, actually. Middle eastern, okay. It could even be Spanish. So you can build a lot of your minor scales like this. Like for example, you take just the first five notes and decide to sharpen the four very common sound, very Indian sound. There we go. You could also do like that's the Phrygian or the very flamenco Spanish sound that creates a very exotic flavor. You've just used that word to differentiate it from the four standard minor scales, natural, harmonic, melodic and Dorian as I'm calling it. So to make something exotic, what do we do? You raise the fourth or you flat the two. Imagine flattening the two and sharpening the four. That would be a very interesting scale. I can't use that in a song yet. Maybe I should. There we go. So you have all this stuff going on for minor and there's also something interesting to consider that you could, again, another word I use is what I call as hybrid minor scales where you don't have to necessarily, and this is what most composers do. You don't have to say, oh, I'm writing a song on the natural minor or I'm writing a song on the harmonic minor. Not necessarily. You can play with it through the song, through the composition. You can go, you know, you saw that. So I can do like a harmonic minor melody and then kind of not make the seven major. I can make it minor seven. So that's what I call as a hybrid minor scale where you kind of mix and match all the minor ingredients. And for one section you will be on natural. The next section you go to harmonic, then you go to Dorian. So your song's theme is generally, or the vibe is generally minor, but you can move into these different parts which give you different emotions. You get a brave versus despair going on. You get a mysterious or eerie versus something more normal, you know, more common or you get something exotic if you want to do the flat two and the sharp four. Now, before I conclude, I wanted to point out and this is a very important thing which we've done on our channel. I release these daily riffs which some of you may already know and we put it out on YouTube. But what's also cool is we have a website where you can access. It's called riffs.jasonzackmusic.com. And on that website, you can go through a process of filtering riffs of your choice, which you would like to learn, which you would like to maybe download a backing track off, which is a feature which is coming up shortly or just learn. So there on the Riff website, if you go, we have an option called key and scale. Key will basically be CDF, GAB and the five black notes. The scale is where you want to explore, at least after this lesson. So the best way I can show off what I know on what you should know about minor scales is to just listen to a lot of my riffs, which I compose on these scales. So you can go there. You can filter it by minor by harmonic minor, whichever minor you want. I even put an exotic category there. There's also the hybrid minor category. There's so many options there and you can filter it, listen to those riffs and either learn it or just enjoy it and observe that. Oh yeah, it's that minor or it's that minor and so on. So there's a ton of resources available on YouTube, but then to access what appears to be now close to 2500 riffs at the time of making this video. It's going to be very tricky for you to find these things on YouTube. So head over to my website riffs.jasonzackmusic.com and let me know what you think about it, how it's helping you or if it's helping you, which I hope it is. Right guys, so what have we done in this lesson? We've looked at the four pillar minor scales, the go to minor scales, natural harmonic Dorian and melodic. We've also looked at how to harmonize it to some level. Then we've touched on the concept of making something exotic where you do flat to sharp four. Then we've also touched on the concept of making things go hybrid where you can combine all of the minor scales together, let them all join the same party and have some fun. Right, so I hope you found the lesson useful. There are a lot of notes which will supplement this on our Patreon and it'll be quite useful. It's a good resource not only for this lesson but you could consider as a monthly subscription with a good number of videos. Okay, thanks again for watching the video. Thanks for your constant support for our YouTube channel. Don't forget to hit that subscribe and that bell. Leave us a comment what you thought about the lesson. Share the video with your musician, people or friends, family or anyone. That'll be cool and I will catch you in the next one. Cheers.