Natural Miner:
≡ Click to see image ≡

Unnatural Miner:
≡ Click to see image ≡

heheh

Melodic minor, I think. Welcome to the evil world of music theory.

From what I understand, melodic minor and harmonic minor are a lot more common than natural minor.

Not sure if you care about this level of detail, but the melodic minor only has the raised sixth and seventh when ascending. If you play the scale, you play the sixth and seventh raised when ascending, then lowered when descending.

Thanks guys. I think I need to dig into this deeper. It's fascinating,

Wow, I forgot that I remembered what charleena said.

dang.

The old way was "ascending melodic minor" as charleena says. It incorporates the minor triad on the tonic, the leading tone for approaching the tonic from below, and avoids the interval of an augmented second which sounds too wide to be a scale step (that's why the sixth is also raised). What's "a lot more common" depends on the style of music.

A melodic resource I like a lot (which I've heard called "phrygian dominant", though it's not a really standard term) consists of notes of the harmonic minor scale starting from the dominant degree. So, for example, B-C-D#-E-F#-G-A-B. Oh, I see a lot of other people like it too.