Major vs. Harmonic Major

Both of these start on C, and both are major scales.

The wheel makes the difference positional rather than verbal: the sixth-degree wedge sits one wedge further counterclockwise in Harmonic Major, and the spoke drawn from the center recolors to the interval that degree now forms with the tonic. Everything else on the two wheels is identical.

That single degree is what pulls a major scale toward minor without touching its third: Harmonic Major keeps the bright major third and seventh, but the flattened sixth opens the same augmented-second gap - the stretched, exotic step - that Harmonic Minor gets from the opposite direction. Reading it is one thing; the difference is much more obvious held under a drone, which is what the links under each figure are for.