Modes for other scales?

[VincentSalizeri]

I'm helping a friend with a concept album, and we decided to put each track in a different mode based off the same scale. Instead of starting with a major key though, we went with modes of the harmonic minor, and the different keys we got out of it sound pretty interesting. I'm wondering if anyone else has tried anything like this.

[mambo4]

Well, people have been using Harmonic Minor modes for years.

But Deliberately cycling through all the modes of harmonic minor:
For practice yes, for actual songwriting no.
Constraints like that are good for generating starting points
but I find that when creating the music it takes on its own direction fairly quickly
and it's best to drop the limits at that point....

[Crazyeelboy]

I say it is good to experiment and going through the modes could be interesting. Knock yourself out!

[kesslari]

A lot of the modes used in Klezmer music are modes built off Harmonic Minor.

[ryco]

A ton of modern jazz stuff has been done exploring the modes of the ascending Melodic Minor Scale.
A little off topic from your first post, but in keeping with the thread title.

[VincentSalizeri]

Mambo: yeah, we're just using different modes as a starting point to help flesh things out a bit.

Ryco: That's perfectly on topic. I was also curious if people took a modal approach to other scales. I'm thinking I might try to see what I can do with modes of pentatonic scales, or maybe the whole tone, or some other less commonly used scale.

[Richard Lindsey]

Originally Posted by VincentSalizeri

Mambo: yeah, we're just using different modes as a starting point to help flesh things out a bit.

Ryco: That's perfectly on topic. I was also curious if people took a modal approach to other scales. I'm thinking I might try to see what I can do with modes of pentatonic scales, or maybe the whole tone, or some other less commonly used scale.

You can't really create any other scale-type modes from the whole tone scale, because all the notes are the same distance apart.