Guitar Scales: the Minor Scale

I kinda mentioned this guitar scale in last week’s post about the Minor Pentatonic scale and the first thing I have to say about “the Minor Scale” is that it doesn’t exist.

“What?!” I hear you ask “…but you were just talking about it? How can you write a blog post about something that doesn’t exist? It must exist, there’s a major scale, there needs to be a minor one!”. I’ll answer all these questions and more! Just read on…

The Minor Key

Do you remember the post on the Major Scale, where I was talking about it being in a major key? Well, there isn’t one “minor scale”, but three of them- and all together they make up the “Minor Key”.

The “Natural” Minor

This is the scale that I mentioned before, and it has the same origins as the major scale (from the ancient Greek system- it was originally called the “Aeolian Mode”). In this form it’s known as the “natural” minor scale- probably because it’s the basic scale with no alterations.

If you take any major scale (we’ll stick to C major for this example):

C D E F G A B

…and, instead of starting on the 1st note, you start on the 6th, you get this:

A B C D E F G

Which is the A Natural minor scale- exactly the same notes as C major, but a different root note (it’s also known as the “relative minor” of C major for this reason).

Going Back to Your Roots

Now, you’re probably thinking “well, it’s the same set of notes, so what’s the difference?”, changing the order on paper can’t make much difference, right? Wrong! Now that we’re starting from A instead of C, every note is heard relative to that A note, and not C.

We also get a different pattern of intervals. Instead of: tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone; We have: tone, semitone, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone. Played along one string, this would be:


A --0--2--3--5--7--8--10--12


…or played as a shape:


e -------------------------------------------------7--8--10--
B ---------------------------------------6--8--10------------
G -----------------------------5--7--9-----------------------
D --------------------5--7--9--------------------------------
A -----------5--7--8-----------------------------------------
E --5--7--8--------------------------------------------------


If you play it, you’ll realise that it sounds totally different to the C major scale- even though it has all the same notes!

As you may have gathered, the other minor scales are more complicated than that…but more on that next week!

Until then, if you have any questions please comment below.
Rob.

February 15, 2011 at 11:00 pm | Guitar Scales, How to | 2 comments

2 Responses to “Guitar Scales: the Minor Scale”