Aeolian (Natural Minor)
This scale is also known by other names: Minor, Natural Minor.
2 - 1 - 2 - 2 - 1 - 2 - 2About Aeolian (Natural Minor)
The F minor scale has four flats — B♭, E♭, A♭ and D♭ — and it is the darkest of the commonly used minor keys. On guitar nothing about it is open; on piano it lies under the hand more comfortably than its signature suggests, which is why so much of the music written in it came from a keyboard.
The notes
F G A♭ B♭ C D♭ E♭, then F. Four flats, shared with A♭ major, its relative. Only F, G and C are natural.
The D♭ is the sixth degree, and it is a semitone above the C below it. That closeness is what makes the natural minor sound heavy here: the sixth leans downward toward the fifth rather than lifting.
Compare it with E minor, one semitone lower and with a single sharp. The two scales are almost neighbours in pitch and opposites in effort — the clearest illustration that key difficulty on guitar is a matter of tuning, not of music.
On the fretboard
From the first fret with the root on the low E string, or from the eighth with the root on the A. The first position is physically hard; the eighth is where the scale is actually practised.
Every chord in the key needs a barre. A guitarist working in F minor is usually doing so because the song arrived that way, not because the instrument suggested it.
Where it is used
Film and orchestral scoring, soul and gospel, and electronic music, where key choice costs nothing. In guitar-written songs it appears mostly as the parallel minor of F major, borrowed for a bridge.
Its relative major is A♭, and the two share all four flats. A song moving between Fm and A♭ has changed centre, not key.
Related Scales from Diatonic
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