Lesson #106, Relative Minors I

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Lesson #106, Relative Minors I

Hello Everyone,

In order to understand the term "Relative Minor", lets first look at the staff in standard musical notation. By viewing the chart in this video, you can see some of the things you will encounter when reading sheet music and how it pertains to Relative Minors.

Every Major scale in music (there are 12 of them), has a different amount of #'s or b's (sharps or flats) within the scale. Also, every Major scale has a Relative, that Relative is called a Relative Minor scale, or can also be called a Natural Minor scale.

Play a C major scale on the banjo......now name the notes as you play the scale. There are no #'s or b's. Play a G major scale........name the notes again.......now there is one #...that being an F# note. You can play all of the twelve major scales to find out how many, and also what the names of the sharps or flats are within any major scale.

Although I'm going to discuss what is known as the "Circle of Fifths" in future lessons, pertaining to #'s and b's, the only thing I would like for you to understand at this point in time is the term, Relative or Natural Minor.

Since every Major scale has a DIFFERENT number of sharps or flats.......by looking at the Key signature to the right of the Clef.......in this video you see one sharp.... that is the key signature....since the G major scale is the only major scale with one sharp contained within it, we know that this piece of music is in the KEY of G major....... or........its relative minor......we'll get into that soon.

Since every Major scale has a Relative Minor scale associated with it.... THAT RELATIVE MINOR SCALE CONTAINS THE EXACT NUMBER OF SHARPS OR FLATS AS......ITS RELATIVE MAJOR SCALE.

We will continue to discuss this in the next lessons, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

David