Harmonic Minor Scales For Guitar - Mode 7
The Professor
Sep 30 2013, 12:47 PM
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Harmonic Minor For Guitar - Mode 7



In today’s lesson, the seventh in a series on the Harmonic Minor Modes, we’ll be looking at the different sounds produced by the seventh mode of the Harmonic Minor Scale.

Used to solo over dim7 chords, the Harmonic Minor 7th Mode gives you an alternative sound to reach for, on top of the Diminished Scale itself, when riffing and soloing over dim and dim7 chords.

In this lesson, we’ll be exploring various shapes for the scale, arpeggio and chords derived from the seventh mode of Harmonic Minor, as well as improv exercises that you can use to solo with this scale/arpeggio over minor chords in different musical situations.



Harmonic Minor Mode 7 One Octave Scales


To begin, we will explore four different one-octave Harmonic Minor 7th Mode shapes so that you can bring these sounds to your practicing and soloing ideas.

The Harmonic Minor 7th Mode is built with the following intervals:

R b2 b3 D4 D5 b6 D7

Or, in the key of G# would be:

G# A B C D E F G#

Start by working the first shape in all 12 keys across the fretboard, before learning the next 3 shapes.

Once you can play all four shapes from memory, try playing them all back to back in one key, so the 6th, 5th, 4th and 3rd -string root shapes back to back over G#dim7 for example.



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Harmonic Minor Mode 7 Two Octave Scales


You can also play two-octave versions of the Harmonic Minor 7th Mode, and here are two fingerings for those scales to check out in the practice room alongside the one-octave shapes presented above.


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Harmonic Minor Mode 7 Arpeggios


When breaking up the sixth mode of the Harmonic Minor scale into an arpeggio, by playing the 1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th notes of the scale in order, you produce a dim7 sound when using this arpeggio in a soloing situation.

Here are two shapes for the G#dim7 arpeggio that you can practice and apply to your soloing ideas to bring the Harmonic Minor Mode 7 sound to your riffs and phrases.


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Harmonic Minor Mode 7 Chords


You can also play all of the dim7 arpeggio notes together to form the dim7 chord, as you can see in the example below.

Mostly used in jazz and fusion, this chord is a bit tense for most rock and pop songs, but it’s worth exploring in the practice room to see if you can come up with various musical situations to apply this cool-sounding chord.



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Harmonic Minor Mode 7 Soloing Exercises


To get started with applying the seventh mode of Harmonic Minor to your soloing, here is a backing track that you can use in the practice room.

Start by soloing over the track using only 1 one-octave shape, until you’ve covered all four, then start to mix and match them all together.

From there, you can solo over the backing track with the two-octave shapes, and finally the dim7 arpeggio.

The chord progression for the backing track is, 4-bars per chord:


Cdim7 - Ddim7 - Edim7 - Adim7 - Ddim7 - Gdim7



Attached File  Dim7_Backing_Track.mp3 ( 4.61MB ) Number of downloads: 313



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This post has been edited by The Professor: Sep 30 2013, 12:51 PM


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