The Problem With Minor Scales (Patreon)

Minor's great when you want to write something dark and sad, but for such a common sound it really seems to clash with our understanding of how music is supposed to work. It just doesn't want to line up with standard functional harmony, and over the years we've had to come up with quite a few ways to reconcile the two. The Neapolitan Scale is a particularly interesting (albeit confusingly named) example, blending things like dominant function, tritone substitutions, and the phrygian mode into one great ball of notes that manages to carry both minor's characteristic darkness and major's famous functionality, with some cool new chords thrown in for good measure. Check it out!