Harmonic Minor Lick

If you want to get the best out of this article, I highly suggest that you read about the Harmonic Minor scale first. Skipping that article won't affect your ability to be able to play the lick that I'm about to show you, but it will certainly help you in understanding how it has been created.

I have tabbed this guitar passage out, but naturally there is an accompanying video to explain the fingering. We were last taking a look at the Harmonic Minor scale in A, so we're going to create this lick from that exact same scale.

Here's the A Harmonic Minor scale


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and here's our lick


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I created that simple lick by selecting key notes from the A Harmonic Minor scale. How did I decide what notes to use? well this is where it comes down to a matter of taste. This is where you make up your own opinions, so I suggest that you take any scale that I show you and see what you can come up with, by eliminating a few notes.

That lick uses the following notes of the A Harmonic Minor scale, in this exact order.

the 8th note
the 12th note
the 13th note
the 10th note
the 8th note
the 7th and 5th notes together with an open E in the bottom.


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This diagram shows the A Harmonic Minor scale with the notes that we are extracting. These notes are the notes that are circled. This may require some thought so take my advice and go about studying this diagram in this fashion.

1. play the notes and count the notes. Don't count the frets. Count 1,2,3,4, etc. If you do it correctly you will end up on the 8th note at the same time that it is listed as the 8th note.

2. After you do this, play just the highlighted notes. These are the notes that we used to make that sweet lick above.

If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know. If you comment with a question - I will comment back.