Scales Grips

melodic minor?

iam a guitar player and have been playing for 25 years. i have a grip on all the scales harmonizing them ect. the only scale to this day that really rubs wrong to my ears is the melodic minor and continually find myself rejecting it because one note in it really stands out wrong. it sounds worse when played in different modes too! do other people find this and i found that doing a modulation from minor to major half way through the scale and vice versa implements the scale anyway with more natural harmonic content.

The reason melodic minor exists is because of choral music. The typical minor scale has no "ti", i.e. leading tone to "do", because the seventh scale degree is flattened to "te". One of the most important elements of melodic writing, according to the rules of Music Theory, is the leading tone from "ti" to "do" in the major V chord. Since the typical minor mode was lacking this leading tone, the melodic minor scale was created, which raised the seventh scale degree back to "ti", allowing for the major V chord. However, since this left that unnatural gap between scale degrees six and seven (an augmented second between "le" and "ti"), which was rather difficult to sing, the harmonic minor mode was created, which raises "le" back to "la", filling in the gap rather nicely. When you mentioned that you liked to modulate to major instead of playing the augmented second, you pretty much solved it the way that the creators of Music Theory did, but instead of a complete modulation to the major mode, they simply applied the harmonic minor.

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