Some Tips on Improvising: Minor Keys

Introduction
Hey, what’s up, hello! First, a little background on myself. I’ve been playing the ukulele for thirteen years now. I took lessons from Roy Sakuma’s Ukulele Studio for ten years before quitting. I was planning to become an instructor there and I was actually training to become one, but then college happened xD

If you haven’t seen my post on improvising in major keys, I highly suggest you check it out here before reading this post. It goes over the idea of “runs,” or notes that you can play in a particular section on the uke that will always sound good in the key you’re playing. Similar to how you can move a 2224 D chord two frets up to make a 4447 E chord, you can move these “runs” to match the key of the song you’re playing in.

Here’s what I plan to cover: using the minor and minor blues scales, playing a major scale over a minor key, and using modes. The minor keys, in my opinion, are more difficult than the major keys at first because there’s more to learn and there’s much more theory involved. Once you get the hang of it, however, you can use this knowledge to spice up any song in either the major or minor keys.

Without further ado, let’s get started!

The Minor and Minor Blues Scales
These two scales are your go-to’s when you’re first starting off (I recommend mastering the minor blues scales first as it just sounds so much cooler in my opinion). Here are the runs I use when I want to improvise on the first few frets:
These runs work like chords in that you can move them over to adjust for the key you want to improvise in. For example, if I wanted to improvise something in D minor (two steps above C minor), I would use these notes:
But what if you want to improvise something in A minor? If you use only what you’ve learned so far, you would only be able to play notes between the 9th and 13th frets, which would sound pretty lame. That’s where the second run comes in:
Just like with the major scales, you can add flair to your improvisations with hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, bends, picking two notes at the same time, etc. Here’s a quick example in the key of C minor:
(Quick side note: if you want a quick introduction to Jake Shimabukuro’s cover of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, you can play this.)

The fun doesn’t stop with learning the minor and minor blues scales, however! You can also incorporate in minor keys the runs that I went over for major keys.

Playing a Major Scale Over a Minor Key (And Vice Versa)
If you look closely at the notes that make up the A minor scale, you’ll see that it contains the exact same notes as the C major scale. This is an important relationship, and the important thing you need to know is that the major-minor relationship is between the first and sixth intervals of the major key.

Here’s how to apply this concept to your playing:

• To play a major scale over a minor key, take the key and go three half steps up. This is the major scale you’ll use. If the key you’re improvising in is A minor, then you’ll use the C major scale.
• To play a minor scale over a major key, take the key and go three half steps down. This is the minor (or minor blues) scale you’ll use. If the key you’re improvising in is A major, then you’ll use the F# minor or F# minor blues scale.

This is pretty advanced stuff and is mostly useful if you’re going to be improvising for a long time and you want to keep things interesting by changing the vibe of your licks. Up next I’m going to introduce something even more advanced: modes.

Using Modes (tl;dr below)
First of all, what is a mode? A mode is pretty much a chord inversion but for major scales. There are seven modes that correspond to the seven different possible starting notes. For example, a C major scale that starts on the second interval (D Dorian), would be this:
At first, modes seem pretty useless. However, there’s one important insight with respect to improvising: the relationship between key and the Dorian mode. Say you want to play something the key of A minor. Using what you learned in the previous section, the A minor scale contains the exact same notes as the C major scale. If we look at the notes in this scale’s Dorian mode, you’ll see that the notes are almost the same as the D minor scale. This difference is negligible. This means that you can use the D minor (and D minor blues) scales to improvise in the key of A minor.

In my opinion and experience, the Dorian mode is the only one really worth learning, as the other modes have too much dissonant notes to be viable. However, feel free to experiment with the other modes as well!

Also, even though it’s possible to play a D minor scale over a song in the key of C major (not just A minor), the modes sound the most pronounced when you’re improvising over minor keys. As such, I typically use modes only in minor keys.

tl;dr: To incorporate a mode (Dorian) while improvising over a minor key, take the key and go five half steps up. This is the minor (or minor blues) scale you’ll use. If the key you’re improvising in is E minor, then you’ll use the A minor or A minor blues scale.

Conclusion
The best way to practice is to just start playing. Remember, you don’t need a song in a minor key to practice the minor and minor blues scales: songs in major keys work just as well. If you’re unhappy with your improvising, try watching and listening to some of the musical greats out there for some licks, ideas, and inspiration. You’ll realize that playing like them is definitely within reach.

I hope you guys find this information useful. Feel free to post your questions, comments, concerns, and your own tips and tricks to improvising

Thank you for sharing. Good stuff! Got it saved.

Thanks for the lessons. As someone who has had no formal musical training, the lessons you have posted are a great example if why UU is a great place. I've got something to work on now.

Thanks very much for taking the time to post. I combined this with your previous post and saved it to my iPad as a PDFs file so I could study it.