All the other modes: melodic minor, harmonic minor, harmonic major, the symmetric scales, and the pentatonics

The idea

A9 gave you one parent scale and seven ways to sit inside it. This lesson gives you five more parents.

Three of them work exactly like the major scale. Melodic minor, harmonic minor, and harmonic major each have seven degrees, so each has seven modes, and you build them the same way you built the diatonic seven: start on a different degree, or bend the parallel one. That is 21 more scales, and almost every sound in modern harmony that is not plain diatonic comes from that group.

The other two do not work that way, and the reason is worth more than the scales. A symmetric scale repeats its own interval pattern inside the octave, so transposing it eventually gives you the notes you already had. The whole-tone scale has only two distinct transpositions. The diminished scale has three. That is not a curiosity. It means a symmetric scale has no root, and a chord built from one has no single answer to the question "what key is this." Greg makes that argument on camera about the augmented triad in "Giant Steps": it is two stacked major thirds, "and by the very nature of it, another major third on top of that, because an octave above C is C. So your root could be any of those." His conclusion at [02:17] is blunt: "essentially Giant Steps the tune would be atonal because there's no real key center."

Hold onto that. It is the door out of Part A.

Watch

"Jazz Scales to play over a Blues" is the most efficient melodic-minor lesson on the channel because it teaches one device and then applies it four times.

• [01:12] The device: over an F dominant chord, play a minor scale with a major 6 and major 7 rooted a half step above, so F sharp over F. He is precise about what it is not: "so melodic minor but not exactly melodic minor cuz it's the same up as it is down."
• [01:29] Why it works: those are "all of the tension notes that you can use over F to lead to the four."
• [02:56] The sharp 11 on the IV chord, conceived two ways at once, as B flat with a sharp 11 or as F minor with a major 6 and 7.
• [04:55] and [05:30] The same half-step-above relationship applied to the VI and the II.
• [06:22] and [06:28] The caveat, which matters more than the device: "So I'm making it a point to on every one of those cords use that particular scale," and then "I wouldn't do that normally sounds a little disjunct when I do it now." "Jazz Scales to play over Take Five" is the same idea built into five layers over one vamp, and it is the best demonstration on the channel of what melodic minor is actually for.
• [00:01] Layer 1, the mode itself. Greg puts the tune in E flat minor and says Dorian is the most common thing played over it, and the vamp asks for nothing more than that.
• [00:37] Layer 2, a pentatonic inside the mode. F minor pentatonic over the E flat pedal fits harmonically but shifts the center of gravity.
• [01:17] Layer 3, E flat minor-major, natural minor with a major 6 and 7, as the first step outside.
• [02:07] and [11:38] Layer 4, B minor-major superimposed, built off the flat 6 of E flat. He explains why at the end: those notes are the altered upper extensions of B flat 7, the V of E flat.
• [03:29] and [09:48] Layer 5, the same shape moved a whole step for maximum tension. He puts A in the bass only to expose the dissonance and says explicitly not to do that with a band.
• [04:09] The constraint on all five: "any scale that you pick, whether it's in or out, you have to make sure that your phrasing and your musical ideas are solid, you have a question and an answer." "Herbie Hancock Solo Technique Explained: Minor-Major Solo Line" at [01:52] for the scale spelled out degree by degree, with his insistence that it is not melodic minor because the major 6 and 7 stay on the way down, and [02:32] for the same device run through a whole turnaround. "Diminished Lick Over a Modal Progression" at [02:43] for the structure, "the structure of it is planing and diminished thirds," meaning the shape moves in minor thirds, which is what a symmetric scale lets you do; [07:11] for the practice prescription, all keys at 40, "start slower than this if you want to"; and [08:11], where he notes the lick is in three against a four-beat bar and is therefore also a polyrhythm exercise. "Why is Giant Steps an Augmented Progression?" at [00:56] and [01:32] for the harmonic-series argument, and [02:17] for the atonality conclusion. "How to Become a Well Rounded Jazz Pianist" at [10:28] to [10:44] for the place where both diminished scales enter the standing assignment: "make sure you have the half whole diminished and the whole half diminish, those are very important for what we're going to get into." "Pentatonic Exercise" at [01:09] for the 1-6-5-3 cell and [01:22] for the rule that generates the whole sequence: each repetition starts one pentatonic degree lower.

Play video

Jazz Scales to play over a Blues

• one melodic-minor device applied to every chord of a blues, plus Greg's honest admission that using it everywhere sounds disjunct

Open on YouTube

Play video

Jazz Scales to play over Take Five

• five layers stacked over one Dorian vamp, from the mode to a pentatonic inside it to minor-major superimpositions three steps out

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Play video

Herbie Hancock Solo Technique Explained: Minor-Major Solo Line

• the half-step-above minor-major device applied to a whole turnaround, with the scale spelled degree by degree

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Play video

Scales to solo over Blue In Green

• his scale choices across the tune, video only, since no transcript exists to check the wording against

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Play video

Blue In Green Scales (slowed down)

• the same material slow enough to copy at the keyboard, also with no transcript

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Play video

Pentatonic Exercise - Jazz Piano Lesson

• the 1-6-5-3 cell and the rule that turns one cell into a full-keyboard sequence

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Play video

Diminished Lick Over a Modal Progression

• the diminished scale as a physical shape, planed in minor thirds, at 40 bpm

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Play video

Why is Giant Steps an Augmented Progression?

• why a symmetric structure has no root, argued from the harmonic series

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Play video

How to Become a Well Rounded Jazz Pianist (in 42 minutes)

• the assignment that includes both diminished scales and the sevenths derived from each parent scale

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Listen

"Blue in Green," five passes, with Greg's two videos open beside you.

1. Pass 1: just the melody. Sing it. Do not analyze.
2. Pass 2: the bass. Write the roots down. Ten bars, and the form does not resolve where you expect it to.
3. Pass 3: one chord only, the one Greg names first in the scales video. Play his scale choice against the recording until you can hear the two agreeing.
4. Pass 4: the whole form with his scale choices written above the chords.
5. Pass 5: what he leaves out. Note every chord where he offers two readings, and decide which one you hear.

At the piano

The three seven-note parents

Build each parent from the major scale by a single named alteration, then derive its seven modes exactly as you did in A9.

Melodic minor  = major with ♭3                    C D E♭ F G A B
Harmonic minor = major with ♭3 ♭6                 C D E♭ F G A♭ B
Harmonic major = major with ♭6                    C D E  F G A♭ B

Melodic minor, all seven modes. Degree, name, and the chord it belongs on.

Two of those seven do almost all the work in the music you want to write. Lydian dominant is the sound of a dominant chord that has stopped wanting to resolve. Altered is the sound of one that wants to resolve more than a dominant chord normally can, because every extension is bent. Greg's "most dissonant chord in the world," which you build in A11, is that scale stacked: the 3 and the ♭7 at the bottom, then ♯9, ♯5, ♭9, and the tritone on top.

Harmonic minor, all seven modes.

Phrygian dominant is the one you will use constantly and the one you already know by ear from every metal record you own. It is a dominant chord with a flat 9 and a flat 13, and the half step from its root to its third is the interval that makes the sound.

Harmonic major, all seven modes.

Three parents, seven modes each, twelve roots. That is 252 scales, and you are not memorizing 252 things. You are memorizing three alterations and one derivation procedure you already own from A9. Fingering follows the same rule as in A9: find the parent, borrow its fingering, and shift the starting finger if the thumb would land on a black key mid-run.

The symmetric scales

A scale is symmetric when its interval pattern repeats inside the octave. The number of distinct transpositions equals the length of the repeating cell in semitones, because transposing by that cell returns the notes you already had. A whole-tone cell is 2 semitones, so there are 2. A diminished cell is 3, so there are 3. An augmented cell is 4, so there are 4.

C whole tone           C  D  E  F♯ G♯ A♯
C dim (whole-half)     C  D  E♭ F  G♭ A♭ A  B      over Cdim7
C dim (half-whole)     C  D♭ E♭ E  F♯ G  A  B♭     over C7♭9
C augmented            C  E♭ E  G  A♭ B
C Messiaen mode 3      C  D  E♭ E  F♯ G  A♭ B♭ B

The whole-half diminished goes on a diminished seventh chord. The half-whole goes on a dominant with a flat 9 and a natural 13, which is the one Greg's diminished lick lives in. Learn both, in all keys, which is only three fingerings each, because there are only three of them.

Messiaen catalogued seven such modes in Technique de mon langage musical (1944) and called them modes of limited transposition. Modes 1, 2, and 3 are in the table above. Modes 4 through 7 have six transpositions each. The current theoretical description of all seven is that they are pitch-class sets with a non-trivial transpositional symmetry, which is exactly the property that produces the limited count.

Pentatonics

Major pentatonic        1  2  3  5  6           C  D  E  G  A
Minor pentatonic        1  ♭3 4  5  ♭7          C  E♭ F  G  B♭
Blues                   1  ♭3 4  ♭5 5  ♭7       C  E♭ F  G♭ G  B♭

Major and minor pentatonic are the same five notes started in different places, so the family has five rotations and you should be able to start on any of them. The blues scale is the minor pentatonic with the flat 5 inserted, which is why it has six notes and why the flat 5 is a passing note rather than a chord tone.

Superimposition is where the pentatonic stops being a beginner's scale. Play a pentatonic whose root is not the chord's root and every note lands on an extension.

Over Cm7      B♭ major pentatonic     ♭7  1   9   11  5
              E♭ major pentatonic     ♭3  4   5   ♭7  1
              F  major pentatonic     11  5   13  1   9     (Dorian, the ♮6)

Over Cmaj7    D  major pentatonic     9   3   ♯11 13  7     (Lydian)

Over C7       G  minor pentatonic     5   ♭7  1   9   11

Over C7alt    G♭ major pentatonic     ♯11 ♭13 ♭7  ♭9  ♯9    (four alterations plus the ♭7)

Check each of those against the keyboard before you trust it. That is the point of the exercise.

Exercises

1. Three parents, twelve roots

Do. Melodic minor, harmonic minor, harmonic major, one octave up and down, hands together, metronome at 40, one key per day in the circle order from A1.

Done when: all three parents in all twelve keys run clean twice through the cycle with correct fingering.

2. The mode ladder on one root

Do. Pick a parent. Play all seven of its modes on C, saying the name before each. Then do the same parent starting from the parent's own root and running up the degrees. Both directions, one parent per week.

Done when: you can produce any of the 21 minor-family modes on any root within five seconds of being asked, and name its parent.

3. Greg's blues device

Do. Over an F blues, play the minor-with-major-6-and-7 scale rooted a half step above each dominant, exactly as he does it: F sharp over F7, E flat over D7, A flat over G7. On the B flat 7 he does something else, so copy that too: F minor with a major 6 and 7, which is the same seven notes as B flat with a sharp 11. One chorus, slow, one device only. Then his correction: replay it using the device on only two of the chords, chosen by ear.

Done when: the every-chord version is fluent and the two-chord version no longer sounds like a drill.

4. Three diminished scales, three whole-tone, four augmented

Do. Play the half-whole diminished from C, D flat, and D. Stop. Those are all of them. Do the same for whole tone from C and D flat, and for the augmented scale from C, D flat, D, and E flat. Prove to yourself by playing that the next transposition returns notes you already have.

Done when: you can state and demonstrate the transposition count for each symmetric scale without counting on paper.

5. The diminished lick, at 40

Do. Learn Greg's lick right side up in one key, hands together, metronome at 40. Then move it up a half step through all twelve keys. Then play it grouped in three against a four-beat click, entering on beats 1, 2, 3, and 4 in turn.

Done when: all twelve keys are clean and you can start the lick on any beat and land the resolution where you intended.

6. Pentatonic superimposition, checked

Do. For each line of the superimposition table, hold the chord in the left hand, play the pentatonic in the right, and write the function of all five notes on paper before you look at the table. Then run the 1-6-5-3 sequence from the pentatonic video through the whole keyboard in that pentatonic.

Done when: your written functions match for all six lines, and the 1-6-5-3 sequence is playable top to bottom at 40 bpm in all twelve keys.

7. Family by ear

Do. Record eight thirty-second improvisations over a single drone, one from each of: melodic minor, harmonic minor, harmonic major, whole tone, half-whole diminished, whole-half diminished, major pentatonic, blues. Label them, wait a week, shuffle, identify.

Done when: you get seven of eight, twice, on separate days.

The door to Part B

The symmetric scales are the point where Part A stops being preparation.

Messiaen's modes of limited transposition and Forte's set classes are the same objects described in two vocabularies. A mode of limited transposition is a set with a transpositional stabilizer, which is why mode 1 is the whole-tone collection and mode 2 is the octatonic. The break is real and worth stating: Messiaen assigns each mode a fixed color and treats it as a fixed object to be filled in, while Forte's set classes are equivalence classes closed under both transposition and inversion, and carry no color at all. You will do this properly in Part B L28.

Allan Holdsworth's "symmetrical scale," the one he named in his 1992 instructional video, is pitch-for-pitch Messiaen's third mode. That identity is real and checkable against the table above. The lineage is not. The attribution is made by analysts, not by Holdsworth, and in his own interviews he describes symmetry entirely in his own terms and never names Messiaen. In Jazz Journal in 1992 he said of the whole-half scale that "although it has a kind of horrible sound most of the time, it's an unbelievable vehicle if you start jumping things around on it." Treat it as convergent discovery. Part B L19 handles the whole question.

George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept is the other door. Russell argues that the Lydian scale, not the major scale, is the parent, because a stack of seven notes a fifth apart, C G D A E B F sharp, collapsed into one octave gives you Lydian exactly, and he builds a system of five tonal orders on top of it that includes the symmetric collections as outgoing levels. Part B L18 tests that claim. For now, note only that Russell and the chord-scale approach you are learning here share one assumption, chord and scale are the same object, and that assumption has serious opposition. Waters and Williams argue that standard pedagogy's chord-by-chord scale matching misses the thing that actually matters, since "if the objects, the chords, are largely standard and syntactic, their connections, the harmonic progressions, are what makes much post-1960s jazz composition tantalizingly resistant to analysis."

Checkpoint

• All 21 minor-family modes, called at random, played one octave hands together with the parent named first.
• The three parents in all twelve keys, fluent and slow.
• Both diminished scales in all keys, produced from any root on demand.
• The transposition count for whole tone, diminished, augmented, and Messiaen mode 3, stated and demonstrated at the keyboard.
• Greg's half-step-above device applied over a full F blues chorus, then applied selectively.
• Major, minor, and blues pentatonics in all keys, plus the six superimpositions with every note's function named.
• Seven of eight scale families identified by ear.

Read

• Source course, Lessons 18 to 22. The chromatic universe. Read Lesson 18 now and the rest after A16. The course arrives at symmetric collections from the serial side, and you are arriving from the chord-scale side, so the two readings should collide.
• Messiaen, Technique de mon langage musical (Leduc, 1944; Satterfield trans. 1956). Chapter on the modes of limited transposition. In the United States the original stays in copyright until 2039 and the English translation until 2051, so there is no legitimate free text online; buy it or use a library copy. Stephen Broad's Routledge encyclopedia entry is the reliable summary of what the treatise contains.
• Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music (OUP, 2011), chapters on scale and macroharmony. His seven "Pressing scales," named after Jeff Pressing, are diatonic, acoustic, octatonic, whole-tone, harmonic minor, harmonic major, and hexatonic. That is the same list you just learned, organized by how many notes any two of them share. Read it after you can play them all, not before.
• George Russell, Lydian Chromatic Concept, 4th ed. (2001). The chapters on the tonal orders. Read for the argument, not for the practice regime.