What is a minor scale?

What is a minor scale?

A minor scale is a scale of seven notes with a darker, sadder sound than the major scale. Its plainest form, the natural minor, is built from one fixed pattern of whole steps and half steps, just like the major scale, but with the steps arranged so the scale leans dark rather than bright. Most listeners hear it as sombre, wistful or tense, which is why so much film, folk and pop music reaches for a minor key when the mood calls for it.

Worked from A, a natural minor scale is A, B, C, D, E, F, G, then back to A an octave higher. Those are the seven white keys of a piano again, the same notes as C major but starting in a different place, which is why A minor is the easiest minor scale to learn. The table lines up its pattern W H W W H W W against the notes it produces, with the step to the next note read down the right column.

This guide is about that one family of scales in particular. If you want the wider picture first, how a scale and a key relate and where the twelve notes come from, our guide to scales and keys sets that up, and it helps to read our guide to the major scale alongside this, since minor is most easily understood as the major scale with a few notes lowered.

What are the three types of minor scale?

There are three common forms of the minor scale, natural, harmonic and melodic minor, and they differ only near the top. All three share the same first five notes, so the choice between them is really a choice about the sixth and seventh degrees. Worked from A they line up like this.

The natural minor is the base form, the plain W H W W H W W pattern that gives A, B, C, D, E, F, G. It uses only the notes of the scale as they fall, with no extra sharps or flats in the key of A, and it is the version most people mean when they just say "minor".

The harmonic minor raises the seventh note of the natural minor by a semitone, so in A the G becomes G#, giving A, B, C, D, E, F, G#. That raised seventh sits only a half step below the home note, which creates a strong pull back to the tonic and gives the scale its characteristic tension. It also opens a wide, distinctive gap between the sixth and seventh notes, F up to G#, which is a large part of the harmonic minor's exotic, slightly dramatic colour.

The melodic minor smooths that gap over by raising both the sixth and the seventh on the way up, so ascending from A it is A, B, C, D, E, F#, G#. Traditionally it then reverts to the plain natural minor coming back down, so descending it reads A, G, F, E, D, C, B, A. In a lot of modern and jazz writing the raised, ascending form is simply used both ways, but the rise-then-fall convention is the one taught first and the reason the scale is called melodic.

Why does the minor scale sound sad?

The minor scale tends to sound darker or sadder mainly because of its third note, which sits a semitone lower than the third of the major scale. In A minor that third is C, and the distance from the home note A up to C is what musicians call a minor third, a narrower, more closed sounding interval than the wide major third A up to C# that you would hear in A major. That single lowered third is the main thing our ears use to tell a minor scale from a major one, and it is why the scale leans dark rather than bright.

The natural minor also lowers the sixth and seventh notes compared with the major scale, F and G in A minor rather than F# and G#, and those add to the darker, more settled colour. But the third is the loudest signal by far, which is why raising the seventh in the harmonic and melodic forms changes the tension without ever making the scale sound bright: the lowered third is still there underneath.

So darker or sadder is a fair, rough label for the minor scale, as long as you treat it as a tendency rather than a rule. Tempo, harmony and how the notes are actually used all colour the feeling too, and plenty of fast, bright, cheerful music lives quite happily in a minor key.

What is the relative minor?

The relative minor is the minor scale that shares all seven of its notes with a given major scale, differing only in which note it treats as home. A minor is the relative minor of C major: both use the white keys A, B, C, D, E, F, G, but a piece in A minor settles on A as its home note while a piece in C major settles on C. Same notes, different centre of gravity, noticeably different mood.

You find the relative minor of any major scale on the sixth degree of that scale, which sits a minor third below the major's home note. Count down three semitones from C and you land on A, so A minor is C major's relative minor; do the same from G and you get E minor, from D you get B minor, and so on. Every major scale has exactly one relative minor built this way, carrying the same notes with a darker feel.

This is where the minor scale sits against the wider picture. Our guide to scales and keys explains the general idea of a scale and a key, and our guide to the major scale covers the bright pattern that most theory is measured against. The minor scale is its darker relative, formed by lowering the third, and in the natural form the sixth and seventh as well, so a lot of the minor scale is best learned by comparing it note for note with the major scale it shares its notes with.

Hear a minor scale in any key