C Harmonic Minor on Vihuela

C Harmonic Minor runs 7 notes to the octave. Below it is mapped onto this instrument's A–D–G–B–E fretboard with every C marked, because what a player needs mid-number is not the pattern but where the root is when the harmony moves under it.

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 armonía is not a soloing section, so a scale here is diagnostic rather than melodic: it is how a player finds which tones a grip is actually putting in the air on a neck whose octaves do not run in order.

Take it slowly against the playback until the geometry stops being geometry, then put it under a number in C minor and let the written line pick its own notes out of it.