Harmonic Minor Mode 4
In today’s lesson, the fourth in a series on the Harmonic Minor Modes, we’ll be looking at the different sounds produced by the fourth mode of the Harmonic Minor Scale.
Used to solo over m7 chords, the Harmonic Minor 4th Mode and Arpeggio bring a strong sense of tension to your riffs and lines as it contains the #4 interval over a m7 chord.
In this lesson, we’ll be exploring various shapes for the scale, arpeggio and chords derived from the fourth 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 4 One Octave Scales
To begin, we will explore four different one-octave Harmonic Minor 4th Mode shapes so that you can bring these sounds to your practicing and soloing ideas.
The Harmonic Minor 4th Mode is built with the following intervals:
R 2 b3 #4 5 6 b7
Or, in the key of D would be:
D E F G# A B C
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 Bm7 for example.
Harmonic Minor Mode 4 Two Octave Scales
You can also play two-octave versions of the Harmonic Minor 4th Mode, and here are two fingerings for those scales to check out in the practice room alongside the one-octave shapes presented above.
Harmonic Minor Mode 4 Arpeggios
When breaking up the fourth 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 m7th sound when using this arpeggio in a soloing situation.
Here are two shapes for the Dm7 arpeggio that you can practice and apply to your soloing ideas to bring the Harmonic Minor Mode 4 sound to your riffs and phrases.
Harmonic Minor Mode 4 Chords
You can also play all of the m7 arpeggio notes together to form the m7 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.
Harmonic Minor Mode 4 Soloing Exercises
To get started with applying the fourth 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 m7 arpeggio.
The chord progression for the backing track is, 4-bars per chord:
Bm-Em-Am-Dm-Gm-Cm
Do you have a question about the fourth mode of the Harmonic Minor Scale? Share your thoughts in the thread below.
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