On the bright side, grappling with them will really help you learn the fretboard. A quick Google search will reveal many fingerings. The only way to make it easier is to not use all six strings. All of the fingerings require pinkie stretches and/or position shifts. Unfortunately, melodic minor is extremely annoying to play on guitar. In C melodic minor, the tritones are between F and B, and between E-flat and A. Melodic minor has two tritones, between its fourth and seventh notes, and also between its third and sixth. Major scale contains one tritone, between its fourth and seventh notes. Melodic minor also has more internal dissonance than the major scale and its modes. C D Eb F G - sounds minor G A B C - sounds major

There’s a constant conflict between the bottom half of the scale and the top. The weirdness of melodic minor comes from the way it lives simultaneously in the minor and major key worlds. You can hear this chord in the first four bars of “Chelsea Bridge” by Billy Strayhorn: The tonic chord in C is Cm(maj7), sometimes called the major-minor chord: C Eb G B However, the chords and scales you get from it are exceptionally dark and peculiar. It’s just the major scale with a flat third. Melodic minor looks innocent enough on paper. The scale has the same symmetry if you write it on the circle of fifths too. Note that the scale is symmetrical along a line drawn through D-flat and G. It’s called the melodic minor scale, and if you want to push your playing or writing in a more adventurous, exotic and challenging direction, it’s a good one to have in your musical toolbox. For musical Jedi masters, there’s one more valuable minor scale. There’s also the blues scale, which sounds good in any key, major or minor. My last post on minor keys covered the three scales you need for most situations in rock, pop, and film scores: natural minor, harmonic minor, and Dorian mode.

E flat melodic minor scale piano