Chord Scales - Part 3: More Scales
(12 Apr 03)
Harmonic Minor
Before I explain the importance of Harmonic Minor in todays music, I'd like to give you a quick introduction on how it evolved. Again, we have to take a look at Classical music and one of its most important chord progressions: the cadence (see also this page of the article "Triads - The First Chords").
Major Cadence
A basic major cadence consists of the I, IV, and V chord of a key. To create a stronger "tension-release" effect the 7th was added to the V chord.
Play this C major cadence:
Now let's get back to minor: If we create the I - IV - V - I cadence in minor, we get this for A minor:
If you play through the cadence, you will probably agree with me that there's not a lot of tension in it. In fact it sounds a little bit "flat" compared to the major cadence. To pep up the minor cadence the Vm chord was altered to a Dominant7 chord.
Next to adding the minor seventh (d) to the Em chord, which is diatonic to the key the minor third was changed to a major third (g#).
A brief note on Dominant 7 chords
A Dom7 chord is made up of the intervals Root (1), Major 3rd (M3), Perfect Fifth (P5), and Minor 7th (b7). M3 and b7 form together the interval of a diminished 5th (b5).
You may remember that the b5 is also called the Tritone and that it has a strong dissonance level that creates tension. This Tritone is responsible for the "instable" sound of a Dom7 chord.
If we delve a little deeper: If you just play the M3 and b7 of the Dominant chord you still hear the tendency for resolution. That's why the M3 and the b7 are called the "Guide Tones" - they guide you to a new and stable sound.
In depth: M3 has the tendency to resolve up into the Root of the stable chord, b7 has the tendency to resolve down into the Third of the stable chord.
in major in minor
Back to our Harmonic Minor. OK, we have changed the V chord to make it a Dominant7 to get a stronger cadence. Furthermore, this means that we changed the underlying scale, i.e., Natural Minor, by replacing the note g with a g#.
Let's take a look at it:
A Harmonic Minor
The interesting thing is that we get the Interval of a minor third between the sixth and the seventh scale degree which gives it this "Classical and Spanish" sound.
Here are the fingerings in fifth position for A Natural and Harmonic Minor: play and listen to it.
Now record the minor cadence, i.e., Am - Dm - E7 - Am and improvise with the A Harmonic Minor scale. Listen closely to what is happening during E7. You can also play Natural Minor over Am and Dm and just use A Harmonic Minor over the E7. This is a more common way to approach these chords.
Chords within Harmonic Minor
Now that we have learned the structure of Harmonic Minor, we can follow the same procedure as with the major scale. We examine Harmonic Minor starting on each individual note of the scale and analyze the resulting scale and chords.
Remember the two different approaches that I used to explain the modes and chords of the major scale, and that we finally figured out that scales are chords and vice versa. The same fundamental rule applies here.
Let's start out with the basic 7th chords that are included in A Harmonic Minor:
In comparison to Natural Minor we get four differences: Ammaj7 on I, Cmaj7#5 on bIII, E7 on V, and G#o7 on VII.
Just incase you are new to some of the above chords, I included fingerings for Ammaj7, Cmaj7#5, and G#o7.
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