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Why does this book have the III and V chord of D minor as F aug and A major? Wouldn’t the III and V be F major and A minor?

It's using the notes from the harmonic minor.

Thank you. I think I was assuming that they’d use natural minor since they only did one style of chords. I wonder why they use harmonic? If you don’t show all 3 styles of minors I would have though natural would be the one to show if only showing one. Or is harmonic more common?

Chords provide the harmony, hence the harmonic minor. Seems logical.

BTW, when I was learning the scales I also (wrongly) assumed that the natural minor is the default and started by learning that one, but in fact in real music it's much more useful to have the melodic and harmonic in your fingers. Nowadays I never practice the natural minor, just the harmonic and melodic.

In minor keys, the popular chord progression is for the dominant (V or V7 chord) to be major, rather than minor. Play the cadence using a minor V and then a major V and you will see that the major V or V7 provides a more musically satisfying progression to the tonic.

Ditto, LOL. All that work for nothing. 😂

In the major, minor system, the natural minor is harmonically modified by raising the 7th degree so that the leading tone is half step away from the tonic. Thats is why it is called the harmonic minor. And therefore the chords are showing in their harmonic form, which is based on a C sharp. That said in actual music you can encounter chords that are built on the natural minor form, but they would be considered as altered form vs the harmonic one. Your book is showing only the common harmonic form which is used in cadences in particular, but there are plenty of altered forms as well.

Thanks for all the rep,it’s, everyone.


Thanks for sharing this with me. I was doing exact same. Sounds like the book has me on the right path then. I’m glad I got this all cleared up as I had no idea I even tried googling but didn’t see much providing these details.

**thanks for all the replies, everyone

I had no idea! I will change my scale practice immediately.

Back in the dim, dark ages (you know, before electricity, before motor cars!) when I took piano exams, I got all the way through my RCM Grade X with distinction without ever having heard of "natural minor" scales.

Regards,

But the melodic scale does use the natural scale in the descending portion.

I had to think about that one for a second. I looked back in my old violin technical books a while back and indeed, we never practised the natural minor scale - it was contained in the melodic minor, which we did practise.
However, the RCM theory rudiments have the natural minor, I'm rather sure. I don't know where my old book is atm.

Does this only apply to classical? I recall reading that in pop music the scale is Melodic both when going up and down.


Although if you played natural minor a lot it's an easy adjustment to get the harmonic down too. Such as I knew D minor natural from working it for weeks that it wasn't too tough then play the harmonic minor.

Yes, and if you know your parallel (not relative) major then it makes it easy to learn the melodic minor. For example, D melodic minor has all the same notes as D major except the third degree, which is what makes it minor.

YES! I never realized how important the parallel relationship was until I started playing Chopin, LOL. And then I started seeing it everywhere. 😂😂😂

That looks interesting - may I ask what book that is?

It’s the complete book of scales, chords, arpeggios, and cadences

Here’s the book on Amazon.

Who said There's nothing natural about the natural minor scale?

If nobody did can I have credit?

As always I refer back to keystring's theory of minor scales..