The Harmonic Minor (and how to use it)

05 Feb The Harmonic Minor (and how to use it)

I am a sound designer and don’t have any background with harmonies or scales. At college and in my own time I study the basics, riffs, scales etc. A special interest of mine was the harmonic minor because of my love for klezmer and gypsy music. We will find out how to make that unique gypsy sound with a sequencer using midi files as easy guide lines!

The harmonic minor is most notably used in klezmer, Gypsy and classical music. To form a harmonic minor scale you should raise the 7th degree of the scale by a semitone. (see picture)

harmonic_minor_scale_clari.midi

The Hungarian Gypsy scale may be created from a harmonic minor scale by sharpening the 4th degree of the harmonic minor scale. This introduces an additional large jump (an additional augmented second interval) into the scale, whole step – half-step – augmented second – half-step – half-step – whole step – whole step.

Getting started

Ok To get started we can practice a little with a keyboard. I assume you have a keyboard as it is an essential feature of any (home) studio. To get used to the harmonic qualities of the scale, mess around with all the white keys starting at A and sharpen the seventh key with one semitone. When you have made some riffs and arpeggios it’s time to add
some chords.

If you are not familiar with chords that you can use when playing a lead melody in harmonic minor scale then please take a look at this website: www.8notes.com.
You can find any style of chords there in any key there is with the Piano Chord and Scale Finder.

MIDI

For the sake of speed we will use the midi files I made for this tutorial.

First lets make a good starting point. Start off with the basic chord progression.mid. Now load the file in your sequencer and assign the channel to a virtual instrument, preferably a wind instrument like a clarinet, to set the right mood. Playing along with the chord progression will help you as a guideline for any lead melody you might come up with.

This concludes the first MIDI
tutorial, please make
suggestions or
remarks regarding this article using the comment box below.

Cheating

I
made a Kontakt Instrument that only plays in the harmonic minor scale,
no mater what key you hit. This is the result of KSP scripting.
 Check out the instrument right
here