You Are Reading the First 6 FREE Chapters (470 pages)
Minor Scales Patterns: Types of Minor Scales
Three types of minor scales have slightly different patterns. They are the natural, melodic, and harmonic minor scales. The natural minor scale pattern (both ascending and descending), and the descending melodic minor scale pattern, are identical: tone, semitone, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone.
As noted earlier with the major scale, a semitone interval formed by scale degrees 7 and 1 (8) has considerable inherent tension, because a semitone is derived from a more complex frequency ratio (16:15), compared with a whole tone (9:8). That’s why the note occupying scale degree 7, if it forms a semitone interval with 1 (8), is called the leading tone.
NOTE: The leading tone is vitally important in understanding how chord progressions work! Chapter 6 discusses leading tones in detail.
Here’s one tiny little tip about the descending melodic minor scales in Table 25 above. Have a look at the D minor scale. It’s identical to the Dorian mode except that scale degree 6 is flatted. So, any time you want to play the Dorian mode in any key, all you need to do is play the descending melodic minor for that key, except sharpen scale degree 6 by a semitone.