Minor vs. Harmonic Minor

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

The wheel makes the difference positional rather than verbal: the seventh-degree wedge sits one wedge further clockwise in Harmonic Minor, 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 gives Harmonic Minor its name and its pull: a natural minor has no note that leans back into the tonic, but raising the seventh creates one, at the cost of stretching the gap behind it into the wide, exotic step between the sixth and seventh. 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.