C Harmonic Minor, Piano Side

7 notes to the octave, lit below across two octaves of this reader's keyboard, with every key numbered by where it sits in the scale. The numbers are the useful part mid-bar: a chart moves under you, and the thing you need is which degree is still under the hand — not where the run started.

Dark and dramatic. The raised 7th pulls hard toward the tonic, and the wide step from the b6 up to it gives the scale an exotic, almost Middle-Eastern tension.

Heard in: Classical minor-key harmony, neoclassical metal (Yngwie Malmsteen), flamenco-tinged rock, klezmer, and Balkan melodies.

The right hand takes the fill and the left keeps the written number sounding under it, so a piano reader hears every note of the scale against the chord the chart called rather than in place of it.

Run it hands together until the window stops being a pattern, then take it to a chart counted in C and let the numbers pick their own notes out of it.