Modes Parts 1 - 9

[Eccleshall]

I like this a lot:

@Hermetech_Mastering

You mention, “The colour tones need to be emphasised by selecting chords containing those notes. Making use of extended chords or suspended chords, rather than simple triads, can be a big part of this.” This opens up a WHOLE OTHER WORLD of searching for extended and Sus chords which will also contain the flavour note and bring more variety to your chord progressions while still maintaining that “modal feel”, very, very cool! I think this probably happens a lot in acoustic fingerpicked folk guitar (my main area of interest).

[simon_plays_bass]

This is an “on holiday, don’t have an instrument with me, can’t just sunbathe “ theory exercise for me. I also hear “major scale” with the modes in series. However as one of my warm up exercises is roots/ 3rds of the major scale played linearly (i.e. on 2 strings going up the fretboard, rather than in one position) the series approach almost works for me - at least in terms of knowing which modes are major and minor. I hadn’t come across the circle of 5ths approach, but I think it may work for me.

Currently I’m (kind of) restricting myself to Dorian and Mixolydian modes (in addition to Major / Ionian and Minor / Aeolian). Mainly on the basis that they are the easiest scales to remember (minor and major respectively, both with a flat 7).

From a practical perspective I try to give myself song references and understand how the chords relate to the modal scales. So a song with chords D G and A at first glance looks like it is in D. But if when you play it, it sounds like A (V of D major) is the key centre, it’s probably in A mixolydian.

My song references for Mixolydian are:
Good Love is on the way (John Mayer) - A Mixolydian
The verses from Crazy little thing called love (Queen) - D Mixolydian (apart from the weird Bb that somehow works)
And possibly a new one for me that I heard playing round the hotel pool yesterday “Don’t you forget about me” (Simple Minds) - verses are in E Mixolydian (I think)

For Dorian my song reference is “So what” by Miles Davis which is Dm7 (D Dorian) and Ebm7 (Eb Dorian) for a lot of the song. Once you know the Dorian scale it is easier to think of it as improvising on 2 Dorian scales a semitone apart.

I’ll give the coloured circle of 5ths a day or so to sink in, then read some more.

Edit 1:
So after a couple of days and another read I’ve got the following:-

1. The colour wheel helps

2. Lydian (one of the major modes (I already knew that)) adds a sharp (the 4th) and sounds brighter

3. The ones with flats (I.e. all except Ionian and Lydian) go anti-clockwise so (as per the colour wheel) are getting “darker”

4. Mixolydian is major with a flat 7 (I already knew this).

5. Next on “the dark side” of the colour wheel (I’m not sure the Star Wars reference helps, but something may come to mind😀) is Dorian. A minor 3rd with a flat 7 (so 2 flats). Again I already knew that.

6. The dark side of the colour wheel keeps adding a flat. So 3 flats for the next one and as we have already used the 3 major modes it has to be a minor one. Applying some previously learned music theory, C minor is the relative minor of Eb (Eb major has 3 flats), so it must be Aeolian.

7. So that must leave me with Phrygian with 4 flats.

8. For completeness, I can forget about Locrian (or at least if I can’t, I’m probably playing in the wrong band ).

9. For the 3 and 4 flat modes (Aeolian and Phrygian respectively) I need a way of remembering what the 3rd and 4th flats are. Maybe noting that the flats come in pairs when written as a scale will help. I can probably quickly remember that the 6th is flat in Aeolian by comparing A major to Am (relative minor of Cmajor) and that 2 of the 3 sharps in Amajor come at the end of the scale. So the Aeolian flattened pair are the 6th and 7th degrees. It’s not much of a jump from there to memorising that the flat pair for Phrygian are the 2nd and 3rd degrees. I won’t be able to do the mental gymnastics quickly enough whilst playing, but this will sink in over time.

Assuming I’ve understood correctly, that is the furthest I have ever got with the modes. The colour wheel really helped, so thanks for that @Richard_close2u .

[Richard_close2u]

Hi Simon, thanks for checking it out - especially on holiday!

[sclay]

@Richard_close2u

Now just for a bit of silliness, and to illustrate one way that modes can be made to sound awkward and wrong, I present some variations on a tune. A well-known tune. This time going from Lydian to Locrian. Apologies if you had managed to put festive thoughts away for the year.

Brilliant way of illustrating this Richard. I’ve not seen this anywhere ( including on my previous visit here…minus points to me for overlooking/ forgetting). I’ve been on a ‘modal adventure’ the last 2 days…
This ‘silliness’ does more to explain modes and modal sounds than the volumes of nonsense presented by others. Again, brilliant exposition.

Cheers, Shane