The Harmonic Minor Scale in Jazz Guitar

Series Summary

Music is one of the primary forms of communication on Earth. Whether the use of tones and melodies developed before, after, or in conjunction with spoken language is unknown; yet music is unique in that it helps us to talk to each other in ways that language cannot achieve. Jazz music was born in New Orleans as Dixieland; and it had an instantly recognizable swing and swagger to it. Since then, it has developed into a style of music particularly suited to improvisation, and a lot of jazz musicians use the form as a backdrop to play more freely expressed riffs and melodies; to expand on general musical themes. Thus while having an increased risk of chaotic polyphony, bordering on discord, jazz opens the field for the musical explorer to go forward.

Jazz guitar music, in particular, is rooted in minor 7th chords and diminished 3rds; its sound is as distinctive as any in the jazz family. In this series of free instructional video lessons for intermediate jazz guitarists, you’ll learn how to play these more complex chords and scales like secondary dominant chords and the harmonic minor scale, as well as some popular songs that use these chords and scales, like Fly Me to the Moon, Satin Doll, and the classic Flintstones theme song. Expert John Armstrong will give you tips and techniques that will improve your ear and give you more confidence in your technical playing abilities.

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is John Armstrong with expertvillage.com. I'm a professional guitar instructor and today we will be discussing intermediate jazz guitar. Okay now to start off intermediate guitar, what we would like to learn next would be the harmonic minor scale. Let me show you a couple of harmonic minor scales. How the harmonic minor scale is created is by raising or sharping the 7th note of the natural minor scale. Here is my A natural minor, 7, back to the root. Let's turn that into a harmonic minor scale by raising that 7th note. Extending it up, kind of a nice little sound there. Here would be the same thing moved over to a D minor. Sharping that 7th note. So a couple of harmonic minor scale patterns that I can use there by raising the 7th note of the natural minor scale. It kind of has a very exotic kind of sound to it. It is a nice scale to use when soloing. As we are going to discuss here coming up next, it is often used for harmonizing. Hence the name harmonic minor scale. In order for a song to truly be in a minor key, it actually needs to be written using the harmonic minor scale, the chord progression part of it does. Any song written and not using the natural minors like we previously did, will be considered to be modal, and would be considered to be written out of your aeolian mode or the 6th note of the major key. "