Harmonic Minor Scale Guitar Chords - Theory With Diagrams And Charts

What is The Harmonic Minor Scale?

The harmonic minor scale is built with Root (1), second (2), minor third (b3), perfect fourth (4), perfect fifth (5), minor sixth (b6) and major seventh (7).

It can be interesting to compare it with the melodic minor scale and the Aeolian mode indeed, they have many commonalities.

Let's start with the Aeolian mode. This is the sixth mode of the major scale, you will see that it is very similar to the harmonic minor scale.

The only one difference is the seventh that is minor in the Aeolian mode instead of being major in the harmonic minor mode.

The melodic minor scale  is also very similar to the harmonic mode but it has major sixth (6) instead of a minor sixth (b6) as shown in the chart below.

Chords of The Harmonic Minor Scale

When stacking thirds on each note of the harmonic minor scale we get seven different tetrad chords that are:

• minMaj7 (1 - b3 - 5 - 7)
• m7b5 aka half-diminished (1 - b3 - b5 - b7)
• Maj7#5 (1 - 3 - #5 - 7)
• min7 (1 - b3 - 5 - b7)
• 7 (1 - 3 - 5 - b7)
• Maj7 (1 - 3 - 5 - 7)
• dim7 (1 - b3 - b5 - bb7)

Harmonic Minor Chord Shapes

The guitar neck diagrams below show the seven chords of the harmonic minor scale previously seen.

They allow to understand how they are organized against to each other. For this, a color code has been employed for each chord shape:

• Green Shape : minMaj7
• Brown Shape : m7b5
• Blue Shape : Maj7#5
• Red Shape : min7
• Grey Shape : dom7 
• Orange Shape : Maj7
• Purple Shape : dim7

The first three diagrams represent the drop 2 chord voicing shapes from the harmonic minor scale.

Now let's see the drop 3 chord voicing shapes of the harmonic minor scale.

Chords And Modes

This short YouTube short video below show the relationship of the chords of the C harmonic scale and its seven modes :

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