7-6 · The Minor Modes Worth Meeting

At the end of the last lesson, I promised you two modes of melodic minor worth knowing about. One of them might be the prettiest sound you can make over a dominant chord. The other is its opposite: instead of making a dominant chord prettier, it loads it with every bit of tension it can carry. This section covers both sounds, and along the way it lays out the complete map of the harmonic and melodic minor modes — all fourteen — so that if you ever need one of them, you'll know how to build it.

The map

In 7-5, we rotated harmonic minor to its fifth degree and found Phrygian dominant. That was one rotation of seven. Remember why the one-note-edit idea works: harmonic minor is one note away from Aeolian, so every rotation of harmonic minor is one note away from a rotation of the major scale. Here are all seven:

Look at the names: most of them are the recipe. Locrian natural 6. Lydian sharp 2. Even the strangest one, the nameless seventh mode, qualifies — it's Mixolydian with the root itself raised a half step. No real music theorist would describe it that way, but nobody plays that scale anyway, so we won't dwell on it.

Which of these seven deserve your attention? Phrygian dominant, mostly; that's why it got its own lesson. The one other name worth filing away is Dorian ♯4, a distinctive flavor you'll hear now and then. Knowing the name and the recipe is plenty.

The same idea applies to melodic minor. Rotate it through its seven starting notes and you get seven more modes with the same kind of recipe names:

In this group, two more names are worth recognizing: Locrian ♮2, which jazz players use over a m7♭5 chord, and Mixolydian ♭6. Everything else on the map exists, has a name, and almost never gets played. But if you ever meet one in the wild, it's one shifted note away from something you already know how to play — and that's the real lesson of this module.

Memorize this: Every mode of harmonic and melodic minor is one shifted note away from a major-scale mode you already know. You don't need to memorize fourteen new scales; you can read the name, make the edit, and play.

That leaves the two scales I promised. Both come from melodic minor, and we'll use two different visualization approaches, each of which you can adapt if you ever need to learn one of the more obscure modes on your own.

Lydian dominant

The fourth mode of melodic minor is the Lydian dominant scale, and once again the name is the recipe: the Lydian mode with a ♭7. Or, if you prefer, Mixolydian with a ♯4 — either edit gets you there.

Players usually call this the seven-sharp-eleven sound. Remember from the extensions lesson: the 11 is the 4, an octave up. So a 7♯11 chord is a dominant seventh with a raised 4 sitting on top, and what makes it special is that it's a dominant chord that doesn't sound like it's aching to go anywhere. The ♯4 turns the tension into color. That might be the prettiest sound you can make over a dominant chord.

And you already know how to play it. Start with the major pentatonic scaleand add the ♯4 and ♭7 — and that's the entire scale.

The five forms follow the usual rules for alternating rectangles and stacks vertically.

The altered scale

Now rotate melodic minor to its seventh degree, and you get the other famous one: the altered scale, also called super-Locrian, which jazz players reach for over a dominant chord when they want maximum tension.

Look at that spelling: 1, ♭2, ♭3, ♭4, ♭5, ♭6, ♭7. Every single degree is flattened, which raises a fair question: how is a scale with no major third supposed to work over a dominant chord? The answer is that the ♭4 is just the major 3 in disguise. Rename everything the way a chord chart would, and the picture comes into focus:

The root, the 3, and the ♭7 are all still there, so the shell of a dominant chord survives — and everything around it gets altered. That's the name, literally: the altered scale contains every alteration a dominant chord can take, all at the same time. You might reach for this in a minor key, while the five chord is sounding, when you want it to feel like it's about to burst.

I'll be straight with you: this is almost exclusively a jazz sound. If you never play jazz, you may never need this scale. But it's worth knowing what it sounds like, because it does get used.

Finding it on the neck

I'm not going to give you a pentatonic framework for the altered scale, because — just as with the Locrian mode — there isn't a clean one. This scale is easier to see through the 3NPS patterns. Compare E altered with the E♭ major scale:

Six of the seven notes are identical. The only difference is the root: the E♭ moves up to E. So the altered scale is a major scale with its root raised a half step — a weird thing to say from a music-theory perspective, but a fairly easy thing to visualize. To play E altered, take any 3NPS pattern of E♭ major, find the roots, and push each one up a fret.

If you'd rather stay anchored on E itself, the map gives you the alternative recipe — the altered scale is also Locrian with a ♭4 — so you can visualize E Locrian and lower every 4 by one fret. Either way, it's a familiar pattern with one moved note. We're not going to grind this scale through five positions; if you ever need it, this framework gives you what you need.

Exercise 7-8: Put on a D7 drone and play D Lydian dominant in threes, the same melodic sequence we've used throughout the course. When you reach the G♯, dwell on it, and listen to what it does to the chord.

Exercise 7-9: Now an E7 drone, and E altered, slowly. Almost every note grinds against the drone; that friction is the sound. This practice is for your ears more than your fingers — the goal is to recognize these two colors, not to burn in new patterns.

So now you've seen the whole minor-mode map: there were two new scales worth meeting properly, three more names worth recognizing, and a pair of visualization approaches that cover any of the rest, should you ever need them.