The Minor Scale

In the previous lesson, you built the major scale, the one that sounds bright. Now we move on to its darker sibling. This is the scale you'll use most often in the music you produce: a large share of trap, drill, melodic techno and lo-fi revolves around it. If you were going to learn just one scale to start with, this would probably be the one.

Eight random notes, two results

Let's start with an experiment, because you're going to hear the idea before we give it a name. In the first figure, we placed eight notes more or less at random, picking from the twelve rows of the piano roll. A bass holds A2 underneath, like an 808 holding the root of a beat. Listen.

Now let's keep exactly the same rhythm, but allow only seven of the twelve rows, the ones that belong to the A minor scale. Nobody composed the second version any better: we only took notes away.

You heard it: the second version sounds like a piece of a track, and the first sounds like a mistake. The reason is simple. When two notes are neighbors, a half step apart, they rub against each other. A little friction adds bite, but when you pick at random from all twelve notes, those clashes happen constantly. A scale filters the notes: it keeps the ones that get along with each other and with the bass. It doesn't compose for you; it just keeps you from landing on the wrong notes.

The pattern of the minor scale

As you know by now, a scale is a pattern of distances. For the minor scale, the pattern goes like this: whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step. On the piano roll, a whole step skips one row and a half step moves to the row just above. Start on A3, follow the pattern, and you get A, B, C, D, E, F and G, and then you land back on A4, one octave higher.

Notice something handy: A minor uses only white keys. That's why teachers love it for beginners, and it's the key of most of the examples in this course. Notice too where the two half steps fall: between the second and third degrees, and between the fifth and sixth. That exact placement is what gives the scale its color.

Why it sounds dark

Now compare the major scale and the minor scale built on the same note. They share the first, second, fourth and fifth notes. The other three are a half step lower in the minor scale: the third, the sixth and the seventh. By far the most important of the three is the third. It's the note that tips the feeling from bright to dark, and it's the one your ear picks up first.

Listen to the two scales, then to the last two pairs of notes, which isolate that famous third note. With three semitones instead of four above the root, everything darkens. We'll come back to this gap when we talk about intervals and minor chords.

The same pattern on any note

The most useful part is that the pattern never changes. Start it on E instead of A, and you get E minor: E, F♯, G, A, B, C, D. Start it on C, and you get C minor, with three flatted notes: E♭, A♭ and B♭. So a minor key is just a starting note plus this pattern, nothing more mysterious than that.

Writing a melody that holds together

A scale isn't enough to make a beautiful melody, but it gives you safe ground. Here's a good habit to start with: begin on the root, wander over the neighboring notes, and come back to rest on the root or on the third note at the end of the phrase. Your ear hears that return as an ending.

In the next lesson, we'll see how to recognize the “home” note of a track, and why two keys can share exactly the same notes.