Module 7 Harmony, Minor Scales, and Extensions

This is the final module of the course. By now you can play about a dozen scales anywhere on the neck, and after Module 6, you can make them sound like music instead of exercises. This module widens the world to take in chords, extensions, the minor scales, and the more exotic sounds beyond them. The punchline is this:

Every scale that matters can be reached from what you already know, using six small moves.

7-1 Big Picture: One System, Many Flavors▶ Watch the video

Maybe you've had this experience: you flip through one of those phone-book-sized scale encyclopedias, or you hear a player talk about the altered scale or the half-whole diminished, and it feels like everything you've learned is a drop in the ocean. There's always more: harmonic minor, melodic minor, whole-tone scales, diminished scales, modes of things you've never heard of. Every one of them looks like starting over.

The good news is that you've already done the hard work of building the foundation. Take stock of the system you've built: intervals and the major scale on one string, the rectangle and stack and the five forms they build, the three-notes-per-string patterns and the universal pattern behind them, the modes in brightness order, and melodic sequences for making all of it musical. That system is complete. This module doesn't add new tools — it builds on the ones you already have. Everything here comes from doing one of six small operations to a scale you already know.

The Skip move is how chords have been hiding inside your scales all along. Keep stacking and you get the extensions. Edit is the same move that built the pentatonic variants back in 3-9, with a bigger payoff. Rotate is how the modes were introduced in Module 5. Repeat makes the fretboard do something a little hypnotic, with almost nothing to memorize. And switch is the capstone skill — how players follow the music in real time.

Before diving in, an honest word about the actual value of new scales, because most courses and scale books won't say this part out loud. Plenty of world-class guitarists have built entire careers on pentatonic scales and a couple of major-scale modes, and they're not missing anything essential. Every scale you add gives you a little less than the one before it — the return on investment drops off fast.

So here's where I think the value actually is. If you take just one new scale from this module, make it Phrygian dominant. Harmonic and melodic minor are worth understanding, because they explain so much about the music you already hear, but Phrygian dominant is where the rubber meets the road. Past that, we're into sounds worth knowing about that you may never need to use.

Use the module accordingly. Some lessons are worth learning cold: the chords, the extensions, the minor scales. They deepen your understanding and pay dividends forever. Think of the others, especially the jazz modes and the symmetric scales, as a guided tour. You have my permission to enjoy the view and move on. Part of fluency is knowing what to skip, and it's better to go deep on a few things than to spread yourself thin.

When this module is done, the next time you meet a scale you've never seen, your first question won't be "what new shapes do I have to memorize?" It will be "which of my six moves gets me there?"

7-2 Diatonic Harmony: The Chords Living Inside the Scale▶ Watch the video

Chords and scales usually get taught as two separate subjects: you learn scales over here, you memorize a pile of chord voicings over there, and it's rare that anyone mentions they're made of the same stuff. It turns out that every chord in a key has been sitting inside the scale this whole time, and the first operation, skip, pulls them out.

Start back where the course began: the major scale on one string.

Start on the first note. Skip the second, take the third. Skip the fourth, take the fifth. Three notes: root, third, fifth. That's a chord, a triad. (When we talk about the third and fifth of a chord, they're literally the third and fifth notes of the scale you get when you start on the root.) That's the whole recipe: play every second note of a scale, and chords fall out. This is what the word diatonic means — it's theory-speak for "everything comes from the same scale."

The major scale isn't evenly spaced, so when you take every other note, the gaps between chord tones come out either three or four frets wide — a minor third or a major third. Depending on where you start in the scale, the two gap sizes stack up in different orders. That, and nothing else, is what makes a chord major or minor. Start your stack on 1, 4, or 5 and you get a major triad. Start on 2, 3, or 6 and you get a minor triad. Start on 7 and you get something a little strange: a diminished triad, two minor thirds stacked together. In the key of C, that gives us C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, and B°.

It's worth realizing that nobody chose those. No committee decided the two chord should be minor. It all falls out of the scale by skipping notes. Musicians label the chords 1 through 7, using Roman numerals or plain numbers in the Nashville style, because that names each chord by its job in the key instead of by its letter. The two chord of any major key is minor, no matter what key you're in. Pull out the one, six, two, and five of C major (C, Am, Dm, G) and you have a progression that has powered thousands of songs, every note of it from the same scale. When music feels like it's "in a key," this is what's actually going on.

Why stop at three notes? Do one more skip and you have a four-note chord — a seventh chord, the sound of jazz and soul and blues, though they're everywhere once you start listening. The flavors fall out on their own, and the resulting table is one of the few things in this course I'll flat-out tell you to memorize. It's seven rows, it never changes, and it describes every major key at once.

Memorize this: The diatonic chord qualities, by scale degree. This table is the same in every major key.

Scale degree	Triad	Seventh chord
1	Major	maj7
2	Minor	m7
3	Minor	m7
4	Major	maj7
5	Major	7 (dominant)
6	Minor	m7
7	Diminished	m7♭5

The dominant seventh deserves special attention. It shows up exactly once, on the five, and it's the only chord in the key that mixes a major triad with a ♭7 on top. That blend makes it restless: play G7 and let it ring, and it practically begs to resolve to the C chord. File this away — later in the module, we'll head into minor keys, where the five chord has a problem, and fixing that problem is literally the reason the harmonic minor scale exists.

One more payoff before the fretboard work. Back in Module 6, when we practiced landing on a target note, I told you the root was one of the best targets and name-dropped the third and fifth. Now you know the real story: the best targets are chord tones — the notes of the chord you're playing over. When you land a chord tone on a strong beat, your line and the harmony agree, which is why a targeted phrase sounds composed.

Seeing the matrix

That raises a practical problem. If the targets are chord tones, how do you find them quickly? Seven chords in a key, four notes each, five patterns — do you need thirty-five arpeggio shapes? No. You need one rule, and this is a place where the 3NPS system pays off in a way that still delights me.

A 3NPS pattern works like a matrix: every string is a row, and every row holds exactly three notes, with no exceptions. Think of the three notes on each string as ordered — position one, position two, position three. Not scale degrees, just where the note sits on its string. Building chords means skipping every other scale note, and inside the matrix, a skip is always one of exactly three moves.

Start on any note of the pattern and make two skips: you just played the diatonic triad built on that note. One more skip and you've played its seventh chord. It works from every single note in the grid, and you didn't memorize a single arpeggio shape — there is no shape, just the rule. One thing to watch: these are positions in the pattern, not frets. The exact fret distances shift a little from string to string, and the warp does its usual thing, but you already absorbed all of that when you learned the patterns.

Let's cash this in. There's a classic exercise that beginning jazz students grind at for months: play the seventh-chord arpeggio of every degree of the key, one after another, without leaving the position. Seven arpeggios, twenty-eight notes. From inside the matrix, it's the same three moves applied seven times. In the video, I demonstrated it in two stages — first the triads, then the seventh chords:

From the outside, that looks like somebody who memorized seven arpeggio shapes. From inside the matrix, it's one rule, applied seven times. And because the rule is about the pattern, not frets and not a key, it works in every 3NPS pattern, in every key, everywhere on the neck.

Exercise 7-1: On one string, away from the patterns, lay out a major scale and walk up it, building each triad by skipping. Say the quality out loud as you go: major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished. You're working on remembering the table.

Exercise 7-2: Pick any 3NPS pattern and any note inside it, and make two skips, and that's a diatonic triad. Move to the next note up and do it again, through the whole grid, until the three moves stop feeling like counting. Then chain three skips for seventh chords and run the classic exercise: every degree, one position, bottom to top. When you're ready, run it backwards; the moves just reverse. Establish the key with your ears before you start: every note in these exercises is diatonic, so if something sounds off, you miscounted, and your ear will flag it immediately. None of this needs to be fast. The win isn't speed — it's the moment you stop seeing rows of dots and start seeing the chords living inside them.

7-3 Extensions: Just Keep Stacking▶ Watch the video

What happens if you don't stop stacking at four notes? The answer is the second operation on the module map, and it barely counts as new. Last time the operation was skip. This time it's: don't stop.

Picking up where we left off, consider the major scale on one string, extended to two octaves. Root, 3, 5, 7 was a major seventh chord. Keep going: skip the 8, take the 9. But hold on — nine? The scale only has seven notes. The 9 is just the 2, an octave up. And that's the entire naming system.

Why do the names keep counting past the octave? Because that's how we got there, by stacking. In a chord, the 9 sits above the 7, so we call it a 9 instead of a 2. The name tells you the note came from stacking thirds. One small wrinkle while we're here: a chord symbol like C9 implies the whole stack underneath — the ♭7 is in there too. If you want the 9 without the seventh, that's what "add9" means. Cmaj9 has a natural seventh; Cm9 has a flat seventh and a flat third. There really are just a small handful of combinations.

And why do the numbers stop at thirteen? Stack one more third and you land on... fifteen, which is just the root, two octaves up. There are no notes left that don't already have names. A full thirteenth chord doesn't just come from the scale — it is the scale, every note of it, stacked in thirds. That's the chord that swallows the entire scale.

So here's what I want you to remember: a chord is a scale stacked up, and a scale is a chord unrolled. They are the same seven notes, seen from two different angles. This is why "what scale do I play over this chord" answers itself more often than you'd think — the chord symbol is often telling you the scale if you know how to unpack it. See a G13 on a chart, unpack the stack, and you get seven notes: the C major family, starting on G. Which, as you know from Module 5, is called G Mixolydian. Many chord names tell you exactly what scale to play.

The chain continues

In the last lesson, the matrix gave us a rule: from any note in a 3NPS pattern, a skip is one of exactly three moves. What happens if you keep applying the rule past the seventh? Nothing new. The same cycle keeps repeating (along the string, diagonal, diagonal), and the notes it lands on past the 7 are the 9, the 11, and the 13.

Of course, you will never play a full thirteenth chord as a chord. You can't: seven notes, six strings, four fretting fingers. And even if you could, all seven notes at once just sounds like mud. Real-world extended chords are played as fragments: three or four notes that stand in for the whole stack. The core of the fragment is the shell: the root, the 3, and the 7, the three notes that carry the chord's identity. Notice the 5 doesn't make the list: it gives you the least information, so it's usually the first note dropped. Everything else is color — a 9 here, a 13 there, and the listener's ear fills in the rest. Actually building those voicings is an art of its own and not what this course is about. What matters here is that you can read the stack.

One last thing, because the extensions aren't all equally easy to use. The 9 and the 13 are friendly: add them to almost anything, and it sounds richer. The 11 can be a troublemaker over major chords, because it sits a half step above the 3, an octave up, and those two notes clash. That's why an 11 on a major-type chord is usually a sharp 11 (later in this module we'll meet an entire scale built around it). Over minor chords, the 11 behaves itself, because there's no clash against the ♭3.

Exercise 7-3: Extend the matrix exercise from the last lesson: starting from the bottom strings of a 3NPS pattern, run the chain all the way to the 13th instead of stopping at the 7th, saying the numbers out loud — root, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13. Then, playing over a backing track, land on a 9 or a 13 on purpose and hold it. You'll start hearing extensions as colors you can reach for instead of numbers on a chart. As always, your ears are the error-checker: every note is diatonic, so if something sounds off, you probably miscounted.

Notice something about the module so far: we haven't learned a single new note. Every triad, seventh chord, and extension came from inside the major scale you already know. That changes in the next lesson.

7-4 Harmonic and Melodic Minor: One-Note Edits▶ Watch the video

In minor keys, the dominant seventh goes missing. In the key of A minor (same notes as C major), the diatonic seventh chord built on the fifth scale degree is Em7, so a diatonic five-to-one cadence is Em7 to Am. It's pleasant enough, but the Em7 doesn't really pull toward the Am. If we make it a dominant seventh instead (E7 to Am), it pulls much harder toward home. But E7 isn't in the key of A minor. So where does it come from? Answering that gives us the first genuinely new scale of the course, and the third operation on the map: edit.

Think about the major scale for a second. Its seventh note sits a half step below the root and leans into it like it can't wait to get there. That note is called the leading tone. Natural minor doesn't have one: its ♭7 sits a whole step below the root and doesn't pull nearly as hard. So the fix is small. Raise the seventh a half step — in A minor, G becomes G#.

Look what the first edit does to the chord built on the fifth degree: E–G–B–D becomes E–G#–B–D, which is E7. That chord now has the two most restless ingredients in music — a leading tone that wants to resolve to the root, and, between the G# and the D, the interval called the tritone, famous for demanding resolution. That's where the pull comes from, and it's where the name comes from too: the harmonic minor scale makes the minor harmony work better.

The edit has a side effect. Look at the space between the ♭6 and the natural 7: three frets, a minor third, called an augmented second in this context. No seven-note scale we've met has a gap that wide. You know this sound. It's the instantly recognizable, slightly exotic flavor of flamenco, surf, neoclassical metal, and film scores. That gap is the sound. It's also a fingering wrinkle: every seven-note scale until now moved in one- and two-fret steps, and this one has a three-fret jump.

For centuries, composers loved what the raised 7 did for the harmony but were less thrilled about melodies leaping across that gap. So they ran the edit again: raise the 6 as well, and the gap closes. Smoother melodies — so this one is called the melodic minor scale. (If you took classical lessons, you may have learned melodic minor with the raised notes ascending and natural minor descending, which is how classical composers used it. Modern players mostly treat it as the same scale in both directions, and that's what we'll do.)

The stretched rectangle and stack

Back in Module 3, we built new pentatonic scales by editing old ones. Here's a variant we could have built then, but didn't: take the minor pentatonic and raise the ♭7. There's no standard name for this scale — I call it the minor-major pentatonic, because it contains all the notes of a minor-major seventh chord (a minor chord with a major seventh on top): 1, ♭3, 5, and 7, plus the 4. The rectangle stretches, and the stack gets skinny in the middle. A little less tidy, but they're the same two building blocks, and they connect across the neck by the same rules.

Now the reframe pays off. To turn the minor pentatonic into Aeolian, we added the 2 and ♭6 in the staggered position. Do exactly the same thing inside these stretched shapes, and you get harmonic minor. To turn the minor pentatonic into Dorian, we added the 2 and natural 6 in the upper position — same move here, and we get melodic minor. Nothing about the added notes changed. We just stretched the frames.

Just like every scale in this course, this isn't a one-position trick. The rectangles and stacks connect vertically by the rules you already know, so you get five in-position forms, same as always, and the diagonal connections work the same way too. Here's Form 1 of each scale:

There's another way to arrange the stretched rectangle, with the natural 7 moved up a string instead. It's not really a rectangle anymore (it's more of a triangle), but you might find it easier on the fingers. The added notes stay in the same place relative to the root and the 5. Try both versions and stick with whichever works for your hands; these are the reference diagrams I promised in the video.

You might be wondering about 3NPS versions of these scales. They exist, but unless you're planning to shred neoclassical metal like Yngwie Malmsteen, I think you can skip them. These scales don't get used enough to justify memorizing more patterns — and if you ever do need them, they work exactly like the major-scale 3NPS patterns you know, just with more awkward fingerings.

When to reach for them

Harmonic minor is mostly a visitor: in a minor key, you use it while the five chord is sounding, often for just that one bar, and go back to natural minor everywhere else. The scale really exists to serve that cadence. Melodic minor, in this basic form, is even more of a specialist, mostly a jazz color. But it's the parent of two modes useful enough that we'll come back to them later in this module.

This is also why we're not going to harmonize these scales the way we harmonized the major scale. You could, since the skip operation works on any scale, but most of the chords that fall out barely get used. In practice, minor-key harmony is natural minor's chords plus that one borrowed dominant.

One more idea, because it sets up the rest of the module. Here's one octave of A natural minor; raise the 7, and it becomes harmonic minor:

Now remember the rotate move from Module 5: if you start a scale from a different note, you get a mode. Since harmonic and melodic minor each differ from a major-scale mode by one note, every one of their rotations also differs from a major-scale mode by one note — and as we'll see, they're often named in a way that tells you exactly what to change. So for most of these scales, you'll be able to use a familiar pattern and just change one note, and you can use the diagonal pathways from Module 5 to turn one octave into three whenever you need to. I'm not asking you to learn fourteen new modes. But hold onto the principle, because in the next lesson, one of those rotations turns out to be the most useful exotic sound in guitar.

Exercise 7-4: Put on an A minor drone. Play Form 1 of A harmonic minor slowly, and when you reach the G#, stop and let it ring against the drone. Feel how badly it wants to resolve — then resolve it. Do the same with melodic minor, and notice what changed when the 6 came up. The goal isn't speed or coverage; it's getting these two sounds into your ears.

Exercise 7-5: Practice the edit itself. Pick another key, find natural minor in any position, and raise the 7. Try starting from the Dorian mode and raise the 7 to get the melodic minor scale. If you can make the edit from memory, you know the scale.

7-5 Phrygian Dominant: The Star of the Minor Modes▶ Watch the video

At the end of the last lesson, I promised you what might be the single most useful non-diatonic scale in guitar music. It's called Phrygian dominant, and it's the instantly recognizable sound of flamenco, surf, and a hundred film scores. By the end of this section, you'll know where it comes from, how to think about it — which is deliberately not how it's usually taught — and how to play it anywhere on the neck with the rectangle and stack.

Start with where it comes from. In the last lesson we edited natural minor to restore the pull to the five chord. Raising the 7 turned the five chord from a minor seventh into a dominant seventh, which in A minor gave us E7. Now it's time for the fourth operation on the module map, rotate — the move you've known since Module 5. Take A harmonic minor and start it from its fifth degree, E. Nothing about the notes changes. What changes is where we measure from: from E, the same seven notes (E, F, G#, A, B, C, D ) come out as 1, ♭2, 3, 4, 5, ♭6, ♭7.

Look at what's sitting inside that spelling: E, G♯, B, and D — all four notes of an E7 chord. So when a minor key borrows that E7, this is the scale that fits the chord.

Back in Module 5, I warned you about defining scales this way. "Phrygian dominant is the fifth mode of harmonic minor" is technically accurate and almost useless in practice: it tells you where the scale comes from, but nothing about how it sounds or when to use it. If you had to think "A harmonic minor, but starting from E" every time you reached for this sound, you'd never use it.

So look at those degrees again: 1, ♭2, 3, 4, 5, ♭6, ♭7. Now put the Phrygian mode next to them: 1, ♭2, ♭3, 4, 5, ♭6, ♭7. The difference is exactly one note. This is the observation from the end of the last lesson paying off — every mode of harmonic minor is one note away from a mode you already know — and it's a perfect example of these scales being named in a way that tells you what to change. Take Phrygian, raise its third, and suddenly the scale contains all four notes of a dominant seventh chord. Phrygian, dominant.

Memorize this: Phrygian dominant is the Phrygian mode with a major 3. It contains all four notes of the dominant seventh chord built on its root.

What does the raised note do to the sound? It opens a three-fret gap between the ♭2 and the 3 — the same augmented second from the last lesson. In A harmonic minor, the gap ran from F up to G♯, the ♭6 to the 7. Here it still runs from F to G♯, because rotation didn't move a single note. What changed are the intervals from the root: measured from E, that jump is now the ♭2 up to the 3. So you've got a ♭2 leaning on the root and a major 3 a big leap above it, and that combination is the scale's slightly exotic signature.

On the fretboard

Back in 3-9, I showed you a modified pentatonic scale and said it would be useful later in the course. This is where it comes in. Take the minor pentatonic and raise its ♭3: that's the dominant pentatonic scale — specifically, the version built from the minor pentatonic — spelled 1, 3, 4, 5, ♭7. The shapes stretch a little, but they're still a rectangle and a stack, and they still connect across the neck by the same rules.

Now add the two missing notes, the ♭2 and the ♭6, in exactly the lowered spots we used for the Phrygian mode. And now you can see it: the Phrygian mode with a major 3.

Here's Form 1 of E Phrygian dominant, at the 12th position — the form I play over the drone in the video:

As always, this isn't a one-position trick. The shapes connect vertically by the rules you already know, so you get five in-position forms, the same as every other scale in this course.

When to use it

The classic setting is the one we set up last time: a minor key where the five chord is major. There's a famous progression called the Andalusian cadence — in A minor, that's Am, G, F, E — and it powers a ton of songs, from flamenco to rockabilly, folk, and even metal. The standard approach to it is simple: play natural minor over the first three chords, and when the five chord arrives, swap in Phrygian dominant rooted on that chord.

Notice how small the swap really is. A natural minor and E Phrygian dominant differ by exactly one note: G versus G♯. You're not so much changing scales as changing one note while the five chord is sounding. Making that flip smoothly, in the middle of a line, is a skill of its own that gets its own lesson later in this module.

At this point you might be thinking: wouldn't it be easier to swap in A harmonic minor, since it's the same seven notes? It's a subtle distinction, but thinking "E Phrygian dominant" and visualizing the modified rectangle and stack leads you to emphasize the notes of the dominant pentatonic skeleton, which are the chord tones. The notes that matter most while that E7 is sounding are E, G♯, B, and D, and they're simply more fundamental to E Phrygian dominant than they are to A harmonic minor. This is a case where the rectangle and stack help guide your hands to the best notes.

Exercise 7-6: Put on an E major drone and play Form 1 slowly. When you reach the F — the ♭2 — stop and let it grind against the drone, then resolve it down to the root. Do the same with the C, the ♭6, and resolve it down to the 5.

Exercise 7-7: Take it out of position. Find an E anywhere on the fretboard, build a dominant pentatonic rectangle or stack around it, add the ♭2 and ♭6, and play the scale in position. Better yet, run it through a melodic sequence like threes or thirds. As always, treat these as starting points and make up your own variations.

So the fourth operation is rotate, with the caveat that rotation is how you derive a scale, but it's not how you think about one while you're playing. You derive Phrygian dominant by rotating harmonic minor, but you think of it as Phrygian with a major 3. In the next lesson we'll run the same operation on melodic minor. Most of its modes you'll never need, but two are worth knowing — one is the prettiest dominant sound in music, and the other is what a jazz player reaches for when they want maximum tension.

7-6 The Minor Modes Worth Meeting▶ Watch the video

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.

7-7 Symmetric Scales: When Geometry Takes Over▶ Watch the video

At the end of the last lesson, I promised you scales so regular that there's almost nothing to memorize. That's what this section is about, and it's the fifth operation on the module map: repeat.

Think about every scale we've built in this course. Each one is some combination of one-, two-, and three-fret intervals in a seemingly random order. That's the whole reason this course needed rectangles, stacks, and all the other bits and pieces layered around them: the patterns look different depending on where your fingers are, so you need something to hold onto.

The two scales in this section are different. Their interval patterns repeat like wallpaper, and since the pattern repeats, most of what you'd normally have to memorize just isn't there. Will you use them often? Probably not. But they cost almost nothing to learn, and for that reason I think they're worth knowing about.

The whole-tone scale

Take the repeat operation literally, picking one interval and repeating it until you get back to where you started. If that interval is a whole step, you get the whole-tone scale, and on one string it couldn't be simpler: it's every other fret. Here it is from the F at the 1st fret, the way I played it in the video.

Count the notes, though. There are six, not seven. It's the first scale since the pentatonics without seven notes, so the spelling is 1, 2, 3, ♯4, ♯5, ♭7, and one of the degree names, the 6, goes unused.

Here's where the symmetry starts to pay off. Start this scale from any of its six notes, and you get the same six notes back. So the whole-tone scale has no modes; every rotation is the same scale. In fact, in all of music there are only two whole-tone scales. On a single string, it's either the odd frets or the even frets.

Memorize this: The whole-tone scale is 1, 2, 3, ♯4, ♯5, ♭7: every other fret on any string. There are only two of them in all of music, and every rotation of either one is the same scale.

So what does it look like across the strings? It's the same three-note shape on every string, shifted one fret toward the bridge each time you cross a string (two at the warp). In the video, I played it from the G at the 3rd fret of the low E string:

If you'd rather stay in one position, alternate three notes and two notes per string. That gives you fifteen notes (about two and a half octaves) without moving your hand:

And since every note in this scale is the same distance from its neighbors, you can start either fingering from any note you like. The pattern is identical no matter where you begin. There's no real root to anchor to, and no Forms 1 through 5, because every position is the same position.

What it sounds like, and when

You've heard this sound your whole life. It's what movies and cartoons play when a character drifts off into a dream or a flashback, usually on a harp. I'd describe it as unmoored: with no half steps in it, nothing pulls toward anything else, so the scale just floats.

The classic place to use it is over a dominant chord whose fifth has been pushed off its usual spot: a 7♯5, or a 7♯4 with no fifth in it at all. Remember from the extensions lesson that if you keep stacking, a chord ends up containing a whole scale. Stack the whole-tone scale in thirds, and you get 1, 3, ♯5, ♭7, then 9 and ♯11: a 7♯5 chord with a 9 and a ♯11 on top. The chord and the scale are the same set of notes. In the video, I played over this D7♭5 grip, using the three-notes-per-string diagonal from the D at the 5th fret of the A string:

It's a tension scale, not a home scale. You float for a moment, and then you land somewhere.

The diminished scale

The second scale repeats a pair of intervals instead of just one: half step, whole step, half step, whole step, all the way around the octave. That's the diminished scale, and this particular version, the one that starts with the half step, is called the half-whole diminished scale.

This one has eight notes, which is why the books sometimes call it octatonic. With eight notes and only seven letter names, the spelling gets messy; measured from the root, the degrees come out as 1, ♭2, ♭3, 3, ♯4, 5, 6, ♭7, and in the video I mostly just point at frets. Chord charts call the four extra notes by their upper-structure names:

Notice what's left when you take those four away: 1, 3, 5, ♭7, the entire dominant seventh chord. That's why this scale fits a dominant chord so well.

The symmetry works the same way as the whole-tone scale, but with wider spacing. This scale repeats every minor third: move the root up three frets and you get exactly the same notes, which means there are only three diminished scales in all of music.

On the fretboard, the natural way to play it is four notes per string, stretching four frets from the first note to the last. And once again, it's the identical shape on every string, one fret toward the bridge per string, two at the warp. Here it is from the E at the 7th fret of the A string, the way I played it in the video over an E7 drone:

In fact, across the entire fretboard, there are only two fingerings to learn. If your four-note group starts on a half step, it goes half, whole, half. If it starts on a whole step, it goes whole, half, whole. That's the complete list. And that second fingering is the whole-half diminished scale: the same collection of notes, started one note later, and the version that fits diminished seventh chords.

Memorize this: The diminished scale is four notes per string, the identical shape on every string, one fret toward the bridge per string and two at the warp. There are only two four-note cells: half–whole–half and whole–half–whole.

What it sounds like

That ♭9 grinding against the chord is the sound: dominant tension with some snarl to it. And it isn't only a jazz thing. Robben Ford built a signature blues-rock sound out of this scale.

Using them

Neither of these is a scale you'll want to hang out in. They're tension scales that you pass through on the way to somewhere else. So think in short gestures: a few notes that grind against the chord, and then land on a chord tone. If you run all the way up either scale, it will sound like an exercise. A short phrase that resolves is more likely to sound like music.

Practice for this lesson is about learning to trust the symmetry.

Exercise 7-10: Put on a 7♯5 or augmented triad drone. Pick any note of the matching whole-tone scale, anywhere on the neck, and build outward from it: along the string, up the diagonal, or in position. Then pick a different starting note and prove to yourself that the pattern really doesn't change.

Exercise 7-11: Switch to a dominant seventh drone and learn one four-note cell of the half-whole scale, starting on the root of the chord. Slide the cell up a fret on the next string, and repeat. For a challenge, finish every phrase by landing on a chord tone of the drone. Making tension is easy; resolving it is the part that takes practice.

As always, treat these as starting points and make up your own variations.

So that's two new scales, and almost nothing new to memorize. Cheap as they were, we've reached the point of diminishing returns when it comes to learning new scales.

7-8 Gear Shifts: Changing Scales Mid-Flight▶ Watch the video

Changing from one scale to another in the middle of a line, on purpose, and without stopping, is the capstone skill of this course. It's the sixth operation on the module map: switch.

When I first started trying to play over chord changes, every time the chord changed, I had to stop, find the new root, remember which shape went there, and basically start over. By the time I'd found it, the chord had often already changed again. With what you've learned in this course, you can now play more than a dozen scales anywhere on the neck. The remaining skill is moving between them while the music keeps going.

I have several lessons on the site that go deeper into this topic (search for "gear shifts" on the lessons page), so this section isn't the complete method. What I want to do here is show you the two most common kinds of shift, connect them to shapes you already know, and get you practicing them on their own and in combination.

Two kinds of shift

A gear shift is a scale change you make on purpose, in the middle of a line, without stopping, to a related scale. The word "related" matters. We're usually moving around inside a key, not jumping around at random. Every shift in this section changes the shapes under your hand a little, and the notes you're aiming at a lot.

There are two kinds of gear shift worth practicing. In the first, the root stays put and the scale around it changes, as when you go from minor pentatonic to major pentatonic over the same chord. In the second, the root moves, and most of the time your rectangles and stacks move with it to a different string set. That's what happens when you change scales to follow the chords.

The root stays put

You've already done the first kind a little. Back in 3-8, when we introduced the major pentatonic, I pointed out that if you keep the root fixed and switch between major and minor pentatonic, a stack becomes a rectangle and a rectangle becomes a stack. The root doesn't go anywhere.

So the shapes swap, the root holds still, and the notes you're aiming at change. That's one type of gear shift, and it's the most common one in blues and rock. Over the one chord in a blues, the major pentatonic and the minor pentatonic both work, but in different ways: the major pentatonic sounds sweet and settled, and the minor pentatonic sounds a little bit gritty. Many blues players go back and forth between them constantly, sometimes inside a single phrase.

You can make the switch right on a chord change, or you can anticipate it by a beat or so, which often sounds more musical. Don't forget to give that ♭3 a little bend when you're on the minor side over a major chord.

A great way to practice this is to play up and down the scales in one position and flip between them after every eight notes, while still always playing the next available note in the scale. I recommend visualizing rectangles and stacks as you do this, but if you've absorbed the five pentatonic forms, there's a nice shortcut: to go from minor to major on the same root, add one to the Form number. In the video, I was shifting between Form 1 and Form 2. The same rule works in every position, and Form 5 wraps around to Form 1.

The root moves

The second kind of shift is a bigger idea, and it's the one I want to spend most of this section on. Sometimes it's helpful to change to a scale that fits each chord as it goes by, instead of playing one scale over the whole progression. It makes your lines follow the harmony, and it's the approach a lot of jazz players use, although it works just as well in other genres.

It sounds like it would mean finding a new root and a new shape every time the chord changes. But you already know something that makes it much easier. Back in 5-2, we saw that six of the seven major-scale modes have a pentatonic scale hiding inside them. The three major modes, built on the one, the four, and the five, each contain a major pentatonic. The three minor modes, built on the two, the three, and the six, each contain a minor pentatonic. And those six pentatonics come in pairs: the six-minor and the one-major are the same notes, and so are the two-minor and the four-major, and the three-minor and the five-major. That's the relative major and minor pairing from 3-8. So inside any key, there are really only three pentatonic scales to think about, and each one covers two chords.

Here's where they sit. On any three adjacent strings, the minor roots form one column and the major roots form another one three frets higher:

Memorize this: Inside a key there are three neighboring pentatonic positions: home (the six-minor and the one-major), shifted up a string (the two-minor and the four-major), and shifted down a string (the three-minor and the five-major). Any rectangle or stack you're playing at home moves to the other two positions the same way, up a string or down a string, with the usual adjustment for the warp.

If you think in terms of the five forms, shifting up a string skips over one form and shifting down skips the other way. Here's what that looks like starting from Form 1:

Let's try it on a one, five, six-minor, four progression in D: D, A, Bm, G. The Bm and D pair is home. The A is the five, so that's shifted down. The G is the four, so that's shifted up. And between Bm and D, nothing moves but the root, because they're a relative minor and major pair. So the whole progression is home, down, home, up. Four chords, and you never have to find more than one note by name.

Same fingering, different hierarchy

Now here's the part I find really satisfying. Remember from 5-2 that you turn a pentatonic into a full mode by adding two color notes, and the color notes sit in one of three places: the upper position, the staggered position, or the lower position. The home pair, the six-minor and the one-major, take the staggered color notes. The shifted-up pair takes the upper position. The shifted-down pair takes the lower position. It's easy to remember: up is upper, down is lower.

And when you fill them all in, you get the exact same fingering three times. Because of course you do. They're all modes of the D major scale. So in terms of the notes, you haven't changed scales at all. What's changed is the hierarchy: which note is the root, which notes are the chord tones, and which notes are the color. That's what changes your lines, because that's what changes where you focus and where you land. It's why I'd much rather think "shift up a string" than "play the G Lydian mode." It may be the same notes, but it's completely different guidance for your hands.

The Andalusian move

Now let's combine these moves. Earlier in the module, we looked at the Andalusian cadence. In A minor, it goes Am, G, F, E.

We already know how to handle the first three chords. A minor is the six-minor, so that's home. G is the five, so that's shifted down. F is the four, so that's shifted up. It's the same three positions we just used in D, but this time in the key of C.

The E major chord is the new part. If it were E minor, it would be the three-minor, and it would live in the shifted-down position. It's still an E chord, so the shapes still go there. But the chord is major, and the minor pentatonic's ♭3 is a G. The chord wants a G♯. So the move onto the E chord is a root shift combined with an edit: your rectangles and stacks move to the shifted-down position, and then one note changes. Raise the ♭3, and the minor pentatonic becomes the dominant pentatonic from 3-9.

This is exactly why I had you think "Phrygian dominant" instead of "A harmonic minor" back in 7-5. When you shift to E and build the dominant pentatonic around it, the notes under your fingers are the root, 3, 5, and ♭7 of the E7 chord. The shift puts the chord tones right under your fingers.

In the video, I play straight eighth notes up and down the scales, changing scales in time with the chords using these shifts, first with the backing track and then without it. Even with the track gone, you can hear the chord changes in the line. And it's nothing but pentatonic scales.

How to practice this

When you're composing or improvising, the most important things are to know which scales are potential fits for each chord, to be able to see how the roots move, and to practice those shifts in isolation. So don't practice this over a whole song at first. You're combining several skills into one, so you'll need to develop each skill in isolation and then practice them in various combinations.

Exercise 7-12: Start with a one-chord backing track, like the A7 vamp below, and alternate: two bars of A major pentatonic, two bars of A minor pentatonic. Keep the root fixed and watch the rectangle and stack trade places. Then try switching every bar, then mid-phrase. I highly recommend doing this in straight quarter notes or eighth notes up and down the full scales in position, as I do in the video, as well as playing more natural phrases.

Exercise 7-13: Put on the I - V - vi - IV track in D below. Pick a position, and drag across a pair of chords in the player so it loops just that one change. When that's comfortable, play the whole loop: home, down, home, up. And when it's comfortable in one position, start in a different position and do it again. Then add the color notes and notice that your fingering never changes, but the roots and the chord-tone targets move in a way that makes your playing more musical.

Exercise 7-14: Put on the Andalusian cadence track below. Loop each pair of chords and practice the shift that goes with it, and then put them together and play over the whole cadence.

This is challenging, so take it slow. The goal here isn't speed. It's knowing where you're going before the chord gets there, and being able to stick the landing on every chord change. As always, treat these as starting points and make up your own variations.

So that's the sixth operation. We had skip, stack, edit, rotate, repeat, and now switch. Gear shifts are a deep, advanced topic, and I've only opened the door here, but the two shifts you saw in this section cover a lot of music.