Aeolian: Minor Keys, Borrowed Chords and the Flat 6th

Aeolian is the natural minor scale, and if you’ve played any minor-key rock, you’ve played it. It’s minor pentatonic with two notes added. Most lessons teach it in a page and move on.

There’s more to it than that. The flat 6th, F in A, is the note that gives natural minor its weight, and it means something different over every chord. And most minor-key songs aren’t pure natural minor at all. Right before they get home, they borrow one note from outside the scale. Play straight through that moment and you’ll hit a wrong note exactly when everyone’s listening.

This book covers minor keys as they’re actually written: the progressions, the colour of the flat 6th, and the place where natural minor runs out.

What’s inside:

• A one-note test for when natural minor fits, plus the second check most players miss
• The four minor families behind most minor-key songs, and how to move them to any key
• The flat 6th as a colour: top lines and descending bass lines that use it without changing chord
• Where natural minor runs out: the borrowed note, where it shows up, and how to switch to it cleanly
• Four one-octave patterns that run from root to root, so you always know where home and the F are
• Where the F goes: why the same note is tension over one chord, home over the next, and a clash over a third
• Ten soloing rules in place of licks
• Aeolian and Dorian: the one note that separates them
• Rock and metal, pop and songwriting, and minor ballads: the chords, the comping and the soloing for each
• Twelve vamps to play over, with tempos and feels, plus a template for writing your own
• Natural minor in all twelve keys, with the borrowed note for each

What isn’t inside: licks, transcriptions, full-neck box charts, or a course in harmonic minor.

Everything is in A, the same key as the Dorian and Mixolydian books. Every diagram uses the same colour code, with the root in black and the flat 6th outlined.

47-page PDF, US Letter, with drawn tab, chord boxes, fretboard diagrams and chord charts throughout. Download it straight away after purchase.