Music Lesson: The Harmonic Major Scale

A pleasant and mellow scale, the harmonic major scale has been used in many popular songs, including the jazz standard Dream a Little Dream Of Me…which I first learned how to play 30 minutes before I shot the video. Slapdash musical playing aside…

The harmonic major scale is almost identical to that of the Ionian major scale except for the fact that it has a reduced 6th note. In other words, take any given Ionian scale, such as the C Major scale printed on the previous page, and lower the 6th note. The C Harmonic Major would look like:



This major scale produces a pleasant but mellow somewhere between a diatonic major and the more familiar harmonic minor.

WHAT’S IN A NAME? This scale was designed to facilitate the construction of chords, also called “harmonies”

Fun Fact: an interesting property of this scale is that for every diatonic scale (this being one of those scales), there is a relative major or minor mode. If those relative minor or major modes are also made harmonic major by dropping the 6th note, the accidental required in each scale is the same.

For example, Bb/Gb are used in D/Bb harmonic major and A#/F# are used in the B/G versions of that scale; therefore B/G is an “enharmonic mode” of D/Bb.



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