Chord Progression question

[TheMaestro]

Music by numbers. Great.

[xandde1]

Sorry, but if you learned that way, you learned it worng (or you understood it wrong, and it was not what was being taught). As I said, tonalities have relatives. Any Major tonality has a minor relative, and vice-versa. They are relative because they share the same key signature (nothing else). They are not the same and, as I demonstrated, they even don't share the same polar chords. So, saying that you can "solo" in A minor over C Major is plainly wrong, and teaching wrong concepts. You could very much say that one could solo in G Major over C Major (as long as F# was avoided), or you could solo in F major over C Major (as long as you avoided B flat). Those statements would be as meaningless as stating you could solo in a minor, and equally wrong.

The fact you would play from A to A doesn't mean you were playing in a minor, but just playing from A to A in C Major. You need more than just play from A to A to have a minor.

It's not important, it's FUNDAMENTAl. And it's not the "harmonic minor scale", it's the fundamentals of the minor mode HARMONY. If you don't have G# in "a minor" you don't have "a minor". It's as simple as that. And it's not because of the seventh over E Major. You don't need the seventh - you need the G# in the chord, because it is the leading tone, and what creates the Dominant function without which you will not have TONALITY at all. And it's not "sometimes". It's "all times" unless you don't want to establish the tonality, but instead create a modal flavor. Tonality lives from the relation V - I. Destroy that and you destroy tonality.

Well, I won't be I extending the discussion, because it has already deviated from what was asked by the OP. I would NEVER tell someone to solo over C major using A minor scale, simply because I don't think that way. It was probably mentioned by someone else (I didn't read every comment, as I said before), but it surely wasn't by me.

To be honest, I don't have a formal training in music. I've been playing by ear for about 20 years and most of what I know was learned by experimenting and reading, so, I will leave the debate for those who know what they are talking about.