b flat natural, harmonic, and melodic minor scales notes

It’s also the system I advise students to learn – I don’t see any benefit from bothering with the CAGED system for scales. So that is the system that we are going to use in the rest of the article.

Easier to navigate between scale shapes.

The two main systems that are used are CAGED and 3 Note Per String (sometimes abbreviated to 3NPS).Ī full comparison of CAGED and 3NPS is an article for another day, but I prefer to use the 3NPS system because it is: When it comes to playing minor scales, or any scale, on guitar, there are several “systems” we can use for organising the notes on the guitar neck. Should You Use 3 Note Per String Or CAGED Minor Scales? If we write out the natural minor scale around the circle of fifths, we can see this clearly: So, any two keys that are next to each other on the circle of fifths will differ by a single flat / sharp. The circle of fifths puts the keys in order of similarity. In music theory, two keys are considered similar if they contain a similar amount of sharps or flats. When looking at minor scales in different keys, it can be useful to compare them using the circle of fifths. We’ll look at some examples of this scale on guitar in just a minute, but first let’s talk about minor scales in general. The minor scale has the following intervals:Īnd if we were to look at this scale in the key of A, creating an A minor scale, we would get the following notes: Now that we have the simple answer out of the way, let’s dive a little deeper into minor scales, what they are and how we can use them in our guitar playing.Īs we initially stated, a minor scale is any scale with a b3 scale degree. This is the E natural minor scale (Aeolian mode) on guitar. The natural minor scale has the following intervals:Īnd can be played on guitar using the following 3 note per string scale (example in E minor):

If you’re looking into minor scales for the guitar, you are probably looking for the natural minor scale, sometimes called the Aeolian mode. When the melodic minor scale is played in descending order, the notes of the scale are same as the natural minor scale.Here’s the fast answer: A minor scale is any scale containing the b3 scale degree.

The melodic minor scale raises the 6th and 7th notes of the natural minor scale by a half step when playing in ascending order.

B flat natural, harmonic, and melodic minor scales notes