Harmonic Minor Scale for Piano, with fingering

The Harmonic Minor Scale for Piano

The harmonic minor scale is one of the lesser used scales, but used wisely can sound great in any type of music, the most common way to use it in contemporary styles like pop and rock is to use it when paying the dominant 5th chord, so if you were in the key of A harmonic minor then the dominant 5th chord would be (E7), or even just playing the 5th chord (E major) works too

To play the scale all you need to do is play the natural minor scale and then raise the 7th note one semitone, so in A you would raise G to G#, try playing the scale over the chord progression of (A minor, G major, F major, E major) play the natural minor on the first 3 chords then when you get to the E chord play the harmonic minor scale, emphasizing that raised note and see what type of tunes you can come up with

If you play the first chord of the scale as a 7th chord you’ll have a minor major 7th chord written (m/M7) so if in the key of A you would write it (am/M7) but don’t worry about that too much for now unless you know about 7th chords, for now start playing and getting used to the scales

Here are all 12 keys for the harmonic minor scale with the fingering and notes over two octaves, keep in mind that if you were to play more than two octaves you would change the end part of the fingering in some of these examples as the fingering here is for if you were going to come back down the scale again, so if you want to keep going, use the fingering for the first octave again.

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