Minor Details
This is a follow up to my blog posts The Key of Awesome and Doe a Deer. If you haven’t read these I highly recommend that you do as we will be building on some of the existing material.
Minor Keys in Music
What’s the difference between a major and a minor key? Major keys can be described as sounding happy, bright and joyful whereas minor keys tend to sound more melancholy, dark and even spooky.
Listen to these two different audio clips to hear the difference between major and minor keys
Hearing Mary Had a Little Lamb in a minor key is very strange I’ll admit. It completely changes the character from light and cheerful to sad and unnerving. I chose to show these examples using the major and minor versions of the same key ( C major and C minor) so you could really hear the contrast between them.
What do you think of when you hear a major key? What about a minor key?
This will be different for everyone. Describing major as happy and minor as sad is a very basic way to compare the two and very rarely is it that simple. Certain major and minor keys are related to each other and even share a key signature. We will refer to these as relative minor keys or relative major keys. The relative minor key is located three semitones below the relative major. Let’s use C Major as an example. The relative minor to C major is not in fact C minor, its A minor. Therefore C major and A minor share the same key signature. Thankfully C Major doesn’t have any sharps or flats in it so neither will A minor.
Take a look at my Key Signature Guide to see all of the relative minor keys
Scale Degrees
What are scale degrees? Scale degrees are numbers that we assign to each note within a scale. There are seven different scale degrees as the 8th is actually the same as 1 but in a different octave. The system of movable do assigns solfege syllables to the different scale degrees. Do will always be assigned to scale degree 1 which is what makes it movable.
Notice that in a minor key the scale degrees are different than in a major key. Scale degrees 3, 6 and 7 are all lowered. I use A minor as an example because it shares its key signature with C major and has no sharps or flats. I tend to always think in C major when I’m dealing with music theory. In order to make the this key A major we would need to add F#, C# and G# according to it’s key signature. F#, C# and G# or scale degrees 6, 3 and 7 have all been lowered (although we didn’t have to do anything) to create the key of A minor.
Minor Scales
There are three different types of minor scales.
Natural Minor - Scale Degrees 3, 6, 7 are lowered (Me, Le, Te)
Harmonic Minor - Same as Natural Minor but the 7th scale degree is raised (Me, Le, Ti)
Melodic Minor - Scale Degrees 6, 7 are raised on the way up and then lowered on the way back down (Me, La, Ti, Te, Le)
Solfege Exercises
Here are some Solfege Exercises that I’ve created to practice Minor Scales. Notice that “Mi” becomes Me (pronounced “may”), “La” becomes “Le” and “Ti” becomes “Te”. I’ve included the scale degrees with solfege in C major and A minor along with the three types of minor scales. I’ve also taken exercises 1 and 2 from the C Major solfege exercises and converted them to minor.
There you have it. Let me know if you have any questions or comments. I always like to hear from you.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post. It means a lot to me. If you would like to hear more from me then I encourage you to subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on social media.
I look forward to seeing you in the studio and online!
Sincerely,
Adam
