Melodic Minor Scales | Shapes, Patterns & Theory

What is the Melodic Minor Scale?

Unlike the natural minor scale, the melodic minor scale contains a major 6th and a major 7th.

• Major Scale Fretboard Diagrams for Guitar
• Pentatonic Scales (Fretboard Diagrams, Standard and Tab Notation)

The Classical/Traditional and the Jazz/Pop Melodic Minor

This traditional style of melodic minor can be found in classical music.

In pop and jazz music, musicians play the melodic minor with the ascending portion of the melodic minor scale (M6, M7) for both the ascending and descending portions of the scale.

How Pop/Jazz, Traditional/Classical Melodic Minors and Natural Minor Scales Relate

If you’re interested in checking out some beautiful baroque music using the traditional melodic minor scale:

• D minor Gigue, Partita II, JS Bach, Solo Violin BMV 1004
• B minor Double (Sarabande), Violin Partita #1 (BMV 1002)

Two Easy Ways to Create Melodic Minor Scales

How to Create a Melodic Minor Scale from a Major Scale

Take a major scale and change the major third to a minor third.

Major Scale Fretboard Diagrams for Guitar

How to Create a Melodic Minor Scale from a Natural Minor Scale

Take a natural minor scale and raise the 6th and 7th degrees.

Musicality Tip for Scales

This has helped me a lot – I believe it could help you, too!

• Singing – What You May Learn as a Guitarist!
• Play what you sing, sing what you play!
• Learning Songs: Listen, Sing, Play
• Playing what they’re singing

Guitar Fretboard Melodic Minor Scale Patterns

Full Moveable Melodic Minor Scale Fretboard Diagram

Melodic Minor Scale Shapes – Fretboard Diagrams

Melodic Minor Fretboard Shapes – 6th String Root

Melodic Minor Fretboard Shapes – 5th String Root

Guitar Fretboard Note Locator

How to Use the Fretboard Note Table to Find the Key of a Melodic Minor Scale on the Fretboard Diagram

1. Determine what key for the melodic minor scale.
2. For example, say you want to play in a G melodic minor scale.
3. Look for the note G on the table below.
4. You find 6th string, 3rd fret as one instance of G.
5. Look above, to the moveable fretboard melodic minor scale diagram.
6. Find a red note (the “root” note of the melodic minor scale) on the 6th string.
7. Now orient your scale patterns so that triangle is on the 6th string, 3rd fret of your guitar!
8. Enjoy!
9. Try singing/humming along to help get the notes/melodies of the scales in your ears.

Guitar Fretboard Note Locator Table (up to the 15th fret)

Melodic Minor and Jazz Guitar

Every style of music is beautiful – but melodic minor holds a special place in a lot of jazz musicians hearts!

• How to Play Jazz Guitar (22 Beginner Lessons)

Two Main Reasons why Jazz Loves Melodic Minor

1. The altered scale aka the super locrian scale aka the 7th mode of melodic minor.
2. Because jazz musicians love to play a major 6th note over minor chords! Melodic minor and Dorian minor are the 2 main scales in jazz that contain the major 6th. Natural minor and harmonic minor have minor 6ths (b6, flatted 6th)

Super Locrian aka the Altered Scale

The mode from the 7th degree of the melodic minor is called super-locrian! You may recall that the mode based on the 7th degree of the major scale is called locrian.

The Super-Locrian Mode is the Altered Scale!

Jazz musicians love playing altered notes. This is why jazz musicians love melodic minor – because they play the altered scale and therefore the melodic minor.

There’s many altered notes – but the altered scale aka super locrian contains basically all of them:

• b9
• #9
• #4/b5 – the blue note
• b6/b13
• b7/#13

How Super Locrian and Locrian Relate

Remember that the melodic minor scale and the major scale share almost all the same scale tones – except for the the third scale tone. Melodic minor has a minor third and the major scale has a major third.

So, in similar fashion, the locrian and super-locrian modes share all the same notes, except for one – the 6th. The locrian has a Major 6th, and the Super-Locrian has a minor 6th.

Color Visualization of a C Melodic Minor Scale

I do hope to create a color visualization that’s more accurate, in terms of actually numbers that may correspond between sound and light. Here’s what I have so far.

Here’s the corresponding color wheel I used to create the visualization of the above C melodic minor scale!

The Melodic Minor – 6/8 Clave Connection!

This is pretty cool! It doesn’t necessarily have any deeper meaning (though it may!) – but it’s a cool and fun way to relate scales to rhythm and clave!

There’s more than one 6/8 clave – but I’m just using one type here.

What is a 6/8 Clave?

The 6/8 clave is believed to originate from traditional West African music.

There are different 6/8 claves, but this is a common 6/8 clave.

In Cuba and other places in the Caribbean and the Americas, these 6/8 claves became adapted to music in 4/4, so a lot of the music in 4 uses a modified version of the 6/8 clave.

Some examples – the Brasilian Bossa Nova Clave. And the Son Clave and the Rumba Clave. The Son Clave and the Rumba Clave are used in many musical styles, the most popular “genre” is commonly referred to as salsa.

How the 6/8 Clave and a 4/4 Clave relate!

For exampe, can you kind of see how the 6/8 Clave sort of looks the same as the 3-2 Son Clave?

• How to Play Salsa Guitar!
• Playing Tumbao and Montunos Together, Fingerstyle Salsa Guitar Studies/Lessons

Converting a Scale to a Rhythmic Phrase

• There 12 half-steps in a Western scales
• Therefore intervals of any Western scale add up to 12 half-steps
• For each interval (usually a half-step or whole-step) we can (for fun!) correspond it to a rhythm.
  • A half-step is an eighth-note (1/8)
  • A whole-step is a quarter note (2/8 = 1/4)
• Since there are 12 eighth-notes in a converted scale, we can express this as 2 bars of 6/8 or 1 bar of 12/8.
• Then we just write out the rhythm of the converted scale and see what is sounds like!

Converting Melodic Minor Scales to 12/8 Rhythms

Practice Makes Progress!