Finding a relative blues harmonic minor from a Major scale

[kentrel]

I've heard that if you use chords from a Major scale as harmony, and play melody with that Major Scale's relative blues harmonic minor you can create some nice sounding improvisations.

I've tried this using the C-Major scale. I know that CMajor's relative harmonic Minor is A-Minor (says google), but I have no idea how to find the relative blues harmonic minor scale.

The A-minor melody with the C-Major harmony sounds pretty nice, but I'd really prefer to give it a blues sound.

Can anyone fill me in on this?

[jancivil]

yes

I have no idea what someone else might have meant conflating 'blues' scale with harmonic minor, but I will hip you to something

a minor's 'blue' notes are:
>the blues third, minor.major.inbetween, which won't necessarily help you right away
c, c# or something that's not quite either, which you of course won't find on a piano;

>The flat five versus the natural five, Eb to E natural, which works like the aforementioned blue third 'in C';

>also variable sevenths, on A, G to G#; note a chromatic rise to C, which can include the minor and major sevenths (assuming you want to keep the quality of that major 7 in C, you can get some mileage out of the Bb compared with that B natural

[Nystul]

I'd guess this is what they were driving at:

The pentatonic scale for C major or A minor (whichever way you want to look at it), has C,D,E,G,A. To get the so called blues scale in A minor, you throw in the flatted fifth (Eb). So over C major you now have a scale with C,D,Eb,E,G,A. That works quite well. Harmonic minor, though, suggests a #7 in the relative minor, G# instead of (or I'd say in addition to) G. Since you are working in C instead of A, that is a note you would want to use with some discretion I think. Sounds pretty good when crushed against or quickly resolved to A.

[Marc Schonbrun]

It's very traditional in the blues to use Major chords (C F G), and use the C Minor Pentatonic scale to improvise against it (C Eb F G Bb). It's not "relative," but actually a "parallel" scale, because they share the same root of C.

The *sound* of the blues is definitely Major chord with Minor pentatonic improvisation.

[jancivil]

NB: any scale or set of concepts can only just barely point to the '*sound* of the blues'.

[Marc Schonbrun]

Of course, but this is a place to start.

[beboop]

I've heard that if you use chords from a Major scale as harmony, and play melody with that Major Scale's relative blues harmonic minor you can create some nice sounding improvisations.

I've tried this using the C-Major scale. I know that CMajor's relative harmonic Minor is A-Minor (says google), but I have no idea how to find the relative blues harmonic minor scale.

The A-minor melody with the C-Major harmony sounds pretty nice, but I'd really prefer to give it a blues sound.

Can anyone fill me in on this?

well, you've been misled. The way to create 'nice sounding improvisations' is to have some 'nice sounding' ideas lurking about in your skull, and the chops to articulate them. That usually takes a bit of cultivation.

Without that, pretty much all you'll get from wanking on Scale X over Chord Y is the sound of wanking.

But OK, let's go with the premise. First, forget the "harmonic" bit, what you're talking about is _relative minor_. _Harmonic minor_ is something else, we're not gonna cover that here.

Let's say you have a bunch of chords strung together, derived from a C major scale. Of the seven notes of the C major scale, two are problematic over _some_ of your chords. (Those same two notes are perfect, or even essential over some of your other chords, or actually essential to the whole concept of tonal music, but we're not gonna cover that either. What we're covering here is precisely limited to the task of wanking on a scale without encountering anything too unpleasant. Or interesting).

The notes that cause problems are F and B. Or, in general terms, the scale degrees 4 and 7.

If you remove those notes from the C major scale, what you have left is the five notes comprising the _C Major Pentatonic Scale_, the pitch set CDEGA. Or, intervallically, the scale degrees 12356.

As you already found out, the _relative minor_ of C Major is A Minor. That also applies to your C Major Pentatonic pitch set, if you use A instead of C as the tonic, then the same pitch set becomes A Minor Pentatonic.

The pitches themselves haven't changed. However, since you're using A, and not C, for the tonic, the scale degrees have changed. A Minor pentatonic is ACDEG, or scale degrees 1 b3 4 5 b7.

Now, add a b5 to your A Minor Pentatonic. You now have a six note pitch set, A C D Eb E G ( 1 b3 4 b5 5 b7). The common name for this pitch set is the _A Blues Scale_. It works over chords in A Minor, and, depending on a lot of conditional stuff (that, yeah you guessed it, we're not gonna cover), it works over A Major.

But hey, didn't we start with C Major? ahh, clever lad, you remembered. Yes, we did, and this same pitch set works over chords derived from C Major. The pitches remain the same, the scale degrees become 1 2 b3 3 5 6. Now, you do have one pitch that may be problematic, Eb or b3, but experiment, it will be obvious how to use it, and how not to use it.

There is another property to this interval set, which forms the foundation of the sixties/seventies rock guitar solo (and everything subsequent that draws on that). But we're not gonna cover that here, either.

Wank around on the pitch set a while. When you get bored, learn some Bach, or some Albert King. Or Charlie Parker, or anyone whose ideas have some resonance for you. No matter how fabulous the bits knocking about in your own skull may seem to be, they can always benefit from the company of fabulous bits from the skulls of others.

[jancivil]

I've heard that if you use chords from a Major scale as harmony, and play melody with that Major Scale's relative blues harmonic minor you can create some nice sounding improvisations.

I've tried this using the C-Major scale. I know that CMajor's relative harmonic Minor is A-Minor (says google), but I have no idea how to find the relative blues harmonic minor scale.

The A-minor melody with the C-Major harmony sounds pretty nice, but I'd really prefer to give it a blues sound.

Can anyone fill me in on this?

well, you've been misled. The way to create 'nice sounding improvisations' is to have some 'nice sounding' ideas lurking about in your skull, and the chops to articulate them. That usually takes a bit of cultivation.

Without that, pretty much all you'll get from wanking on Scale X over Chord Y is the sound of wanking.

But OK, let's go with the premise. First, forget the "harmonic" bit, what you're talking about is _relative minor_. _Harmonic minor_ is something else, we're not gonna cover that here.

Let's say you have a bunch of chords strung together, derived from a C major scale. Of the seven notes of the C major scale, two are problematic over _some_ of your chords. (Those same two notes are perfect, or even essential over some of your other chords, or actually essential to the whole concept of tonal music, but we're not gonna cover that either. What we're covering here is precisely limited to the task of wanking on a scale without encountering anything too unpleasant. Or interesting).

The notes that cause problems are F and B. Or, in general terms, the scale degrees 4 and 7.

first, of course I agree with your take.

You might explain to the neophyte(s) why f AND b are problematic.
nothing is problematic in and of itself; I should channel Miles Davis on 'wrong notes' but I can't remember the quote. in the context of trying to sound all bluesy 'n stuff, the tritone f vs b wants to do its thing and resolve like a cornball to C maj. f and b outwards to e and c.
stylistically, this usually won't fit, and would require some experience to do anything with.

SO, you tend to want to lose ONE of 'em at least. (or, throw the baby out with the bathwater...)
in a so-called blues rock context, you might not want the b, the major 7 of C, it's 'sweet'; but this ignores the 'poignant' b vs a minor, which is very typical of the style I'm imagining the poster of the topic is going for.

Only, at this point, I bet that the desired sound is actually the parallel minor vs major, as there isn't really any consideration of relative minor vs major that's particularly 'bluesy', and especially because any difference is ambiguous. 'a minor' blue notes sound blue cf. A, and do something else cf. C. We're in a weird zone here.

SO, consider basically these things: 'bluesy C minor' will have Bb versus C major's B natural. Also Eb and E natural are in the ballpark of your blue third, over the C tonic. This is only problematic in theory, from a western music POV.

Embrace Eb versus E, minor vs major thirds (blues singers sing in between these most of the time anyways).

IE:
Here's a chord that isn't terrifically problematic, I don't think, in a blues context:

C E Bb D#.

[Marc Schonbrun]

That's *the* best example of a blues chord there is.
Which third wins? Both.

[beboop]

nothing is problematic in and of itself; I should channel Miles Davis on 'wrong notes' but I can't remember the quote.

well, I can quote my old guitar teacher -- any note fits any chord, if the line is strong enough. It wasn't like a proclamation from Olympus, he just said it as a commonplace observation, but it's stuck with me as meaning much more than I first understood. He wasn't necessarily talking 'outside', either, real straight-ahead guy in the Johnny Smith vein.

My guess is what the OP was talking about in the first part of his post is the 1 2 b3 3 5 6 scale, sometimes called the 'major blues scale' -- using major pentatonic (with or without the added b3) to improvise over a progression without having to consider each chord individually is a pretty standard idea.

And that scale is everywhere, at least in the last century or so of American popular/jazz/folk music -- play it ascending, you can hear the classic bluegrass guitar lick (the Lester Flatt G run), a swing era blues riff, fragments of a Monk tune, a Wardell Gray solo, a BB King blues, a Jimmy Page solo, etc ad infinitum.

Only, at this point, I bet that the desired sound is actually the parallel minor .

yeah, minor pentatonic (with or without the added b5) from the tonic may be just what the OP is looking for when he says 'blues sound'.

What we think of as 'bluesy' is a funny thing -- I'd have to guess (based on listening to and transcribing a ton o' stuff over the years) that historically the 1 2 b3 3 5 6 scale has been used a lot more in blues than the 1 b3 4 b5 5 b7 scale, but it's the latter that's ended up with the designation 'blues scale'. To me blues feel is mostly in the articulation and phrasing, not so much the pitch set. I'm thinking of one Lester Young solo, playing the most exquisite blues imaginable, mostly just major pentatonic, no officially sanctioned 'blue notes' at all.

But yeah, in teaching I used to introduce 'the blues sound' the same way, b3 / b5 / b7 over a major triad or dominant 7th, bending b3 up slightly, etc etc. OTOH you can remove those elements and still have something unmistakeably 'blues'.

all of which is much easier to demonstrate in real life than to type