The Melodic Minor #5 Scale

Juampy explores a scale that few will be readily familiar with, despite its prevalence in  jazz and classical music. This scale is the seven-note Melodic minor #5.

The sound of the scale is diminished -  dark and tense sound with a hint of an eastern flavour. He shows how this can be used in both blues and jazz settings.

The seven-note C Melodic minor #5 is spelled C,D,Eb,F, G#,A,B

This scale is a subset from the eight-note Diminishedscale:

i.e., The C Diminished would be spelled: C.D,Eb,F,F#,G#.A,B.

So the Melodic minor omits the sharped 5th note contained in the eight note Diminished scale.

(It is identical to the 8-note C Diminished scale without the F# / #4th.)

This scale creates new chords that were used a lot by the expressionist composers, like Richard Strauss, Wagner.

Jazz composers such as Wayne Shorter andHerbie Hancock employed this scale.

Many may be familiar with it from the compositions of Alan Holdsworth.

Juampy offers many single-lineand chordal exercises to get familiar with this, cycling through the modes for familiarity with the different offspring.

Juampy explores:

• Application of different chord qualities. This where he goes in depth, playing over different tonalities - minor , major 7, dominant and half-diminished sounds.
• Blues: He then applies this information with playing over major and minor blues progressions.
• Jazz: Going even further, he shows you how to apply this information to standards, in particular 2-5-1 applications.
• Quartal harmony: Of compositional interest is his section on quartile and cluster sounds, where he applies the Melodic minor #5 to quartile harmonies.

One of the most satisfying courses on a type of harmony that you will find very little information elsewhere in either books or on the internet.

Congratulations to the depth of research and practical examples on this course to Mr. Juarez.

Course Description by Mike Bryant

• Running time: 67 minutes
• 8 pages of PDF material