I first became aware of the harmonic minor scale back in high school, originally as an abstract entity I learned in music theory class, in which the seventh note of the natural minor scale was raised a half step. I later discovered that it was the “secret scale” that a certain young hot-shot, Strat-wielding shredder from Sweden named Yngwie Malmsteen was using to achieve his uber-dramatic “neoclassical metal” sound. Still, from a practical standpoint, I had no idea how to apply these two ostensibly related pieces of information to my own guitar playing. I did, however, manage to cop a ham-fisted version of what a friend of mine called the “Spanish scale,” an exotic-sounding series of notes that worked well when played over two major chords a half-step apart from each other in a back-and-forth vamp. I concluded that this scale, or at least some form of it, was probably what Iron Maiden were playing in their song “Powerslave.”
It wasn’t until well into my studies in college as a music major that the implicit logic of the harmonic minor scale and its raised seventh degree finally revealed itself. Lo and behold, I made the connection that the “Spanish scale” I had learned was actually just the harmonic minor scale’s fifth mode, meaning that scale starting from its fifth note, or degree, with that note heard as a new tonal center. In this lesson, I’d like to present the theoretical basis of this relationship and reveal how the harmonic minor scale can spawn a set of seven relative modes in the same way that the major scale does. But before delving into the harmonic minor scale and its modes, and looking at practical applications of them, let’s first examine the scale of which it is a variant, natural