Scale Modes: help needed please.

[Richard Lindsey]

Originally Posted by Rockin John

Thanks.

So for E, the Key Sig would still be 4 sharps?

But every A would be accidentally # (unless A nat was required in a given bar(s) )?

From that the musician would understand that the Key (tone centre?) was E; not E Maj, but the Lydian mode of E?

That's one way of doing it, and a fairly common one. Much rock, pop, and folk is, at least in spots, as much modal as conventionally tonal. Think of any of 8 zillion songs that clearly have a tonal center of D, but they cycle around D C G D, with never an A to be found. It's common to use a D major key sig and notate all the C naturals as accidentals. Sometimes in jazz, when the harmony gets screwy and not easily explicable in standard functional terms, the composer dispenses with key sigs altogether and just notates all sharps and flats as accidentals.

[ehiunno]

Originally Posted by Richard Lindsey

I think there's some confusion here. Just my $0.02, but I think it's a little misleading to talk about A lydian as being the "lydian mode of E major." I know it's done, but I think that's one of the things that screw people up about modes. Call it the fourth mode of E major maybe. Calling it the lydian mode of E major makes might make some of us (well, me anyway) wonder if you mean E lydian. My own bias--and I admit to having strong opinions about this--is that the whole "modes of the major scale" concept, building them off successive degrees of the major scale, may be more trouble than it's worth.

And no no no, if you are writing a song that is "truly in E lydian," you are NOT using the tonal center of B major! You are NOT in B major, even though you are using the same notes that are in B major. That was the whole point of my earlier post, and again, this is part of the reason why attaching modes inextricably to degrees of the major scale can mess up understanding them IMO.

As I said, when you say that a piece is "in" some key or mode, you are specifying two things. (1) The tonal center, or the note that serves as the tonic or whatever. This note gives its name to the key or mode. Thus in G major, the tonal center is G; in A minor, it's A; and in E lydian, it's E. (2) The set of notes that occur naturally in that key or mode. In D dorian, it's D E F G A B C; in E lydian, it's E F# G# A# B C# D#.

Now, you cannot meaningfully be "in" a key *that is not also the tonal center*. Thus, if your piece is truly in E lydian, you cannot, by definition, be in B major--simply because B is not the tonal center, E is. Even though the component notes are the same. Similarly, a piece like "So What" (my favorite example, just because it's so clear and simple) is in D dorian and Eb dorian. It is NOT in C and Db. Even though the component notes are the same.

It's best to get away from the idea that modes *have* to be attached at the hip to major scales in some way. You do find them naturally occurring in standard major-minor harmony, but they're not limited to that. They exist as their own musical entities. A mode is not just a derivative of a scale, regardless of how it may have started. It *is* a scale in its own right. That's why I think it's important to learn them in a parallel fashion, that is, from the same starting point. That's how you're really gonna hear how they differ from each other.

thats another good way to put it, when i think about modes im usually thinking in roman numeral dictation where if your playing a ii V7 I in C major your playing D dorian, G mixolydian, and C ionian, all while playing the same notes and key centre of C maj. if a song was truely in E lydian you would be still be playing the I as E and not B so i see what yoru saying, even though the I would be the lydian mode, which would confuse the living crap out of me and it woudl be a lot simpler to call it the IV of Bmaj, even though thats not what hes trying to do

[bassplayer2106]

Hi there are two types of mode,those derived from a particular major scale and those relating back to a scale. C dorian ( C,D,Eb,F,G,Ab,Bb,c ) would actually relate back to the Bb major scale it being the second of that particular scale.The dorian mode of C major is D dorian (D,E,F,G,A,B,C) the second note of that scale.Basically you are just playing the original major scale starting a tone up on the second or a minor scale with a major 6th. It can be very confusing learning from books.You only have to get one thing wrong without knowing it and then everything else afterwards can be wrong.You then spend ages unlearning it all and relearning.My strong advice is to get a good teacher.I learned the hard way.

[Rockin John]

In the few days over which I've being trying to learn about Modes, my personal preference is falling towards regarding Modes as scales in their own right, rather than them being attached to a Major scale. I personally find the concept too confusing.

If E Lydian has (effectively) the same Key Sig as B Maj, I'll just have to learn to live with that.

Richard, I found your reply to ehiunno very enlightening. It answered questions that I didn't even know I needed to ask. Brilliant.

John

[Richard Lindsey]

Originally Posted by Rockin John

In the few days over which I've being trying to learn about Modes, my personal preference is falling towards regarding Modes as scales in their own right, rather than them being attached to a Major scale. I personally find the concept too confusing.

Glad to be of help, mate.

Regarding the modes, it doesn't have to be totally an either-or thing. It's not at all bad to know how the modes occur as derivatives of a major scale; I just don't think it's helpful to think of them as inseparably joined at the hip.

But you really don't always have to think of playing a different mode with every chord, at least not in functional tonal harmonic settings where all you're really doing is executing a "frame shift" on a single major scale. If you're playing | C Dm | G C |, that's clearly a diatonic progression in C. You can think of yourself as being in C throughout, and just select different "prefer" and "avoid" notes for each chord. (Note: this does not mean just noodling in C--quite the opposite.) Often, you really don't need to posit C ionian, D dorian, G mixolydian, C ionian, though of course you can if you want. (At faster tempos, I don't want to, and probably can't, work that hard for fast-moving chords!)

[Rockin John]

Oh dear, I'm getting lost again......

Richard said:

If you're playing | C Dm | G C |, that's clearly a diatonic progression in C. You can think of yourself as being in C throughout, and just select different "prefer" and "avoid" notes for each chord. (Note: this does not mean just noodling in C--quite the opposite.) Often, you really don't need to posit C ionian, D dorian, G mixolydian, C ionian, though of course you can if you want.

Please (he asked feeling rather foolish) what is a diatonic progression?

For that diatonic progression, please explain why you chose D dorian for the Dm, and G mixolydian for G. I don't understand that, I'm affraid. (I have made the presumption that C is ionian because it is the tonic or tonal centre as you have outlined previously?)

And, do you mean that each new chord being used within an existing scale can be regarded being part of another scale / part of a scale named after the chord? That doesn't sound right, does it?

Thanks.

John

[Richard Lindsey]

Originally Posted by Rockin John

Oh dear, I'm getting lost again......

Richard said:


Please (he asked feeling rather foolish) what is a diatonic progression?

For that diatonic progression, please explain why you chose D dorian for the Dm, and G mixolydian for G. I don't understand that, I'm affraid. (I have made the presumption that C is ionian because it is the tonic or tonal centre as you have outlined previously?)

And, do you mean that each new chord being used within an existing scale can be regarded being part of another scale / part of a scale named after the chord? That doesn't sound right, does it?

Thanks.

John

All I mean by a diatonic progression is one that contains only chords made of notes that occur "naturally" in the specified original key, without accidentals. Say you're in C major. That means the "naturally occurring" notes are C D E F G A B. So in the progression C Dm G C, the chords contain *only* various combinations of those seven notes (C E G, D F A, G B D, C E G). No jokers in the deck--no Bb, no D#, nothing outside the original set.

One way of approaching the idea of how to play over different chords is to posit that when you go to a different chord, you're playing a different mode of the parent major scale. This is the consequence of the "modes of the major scale" approach. The dorian mode is the mode you get if you take the notes of the C major scale and do a "frame shift" (as with DNA copying) and start with the second degree of the scale, namely D. If you do the frame shift to the fifth degree, G, you get G mixolydian. That's where the modes I mentioned come from.

Now, this approach works, if you can keep up (bebop at 300 bpm, anyone?), but I personally have come to find it unnecessary and needlessly complex in many cases. In no analysis of standard functional harmony that I'm aware of is it necessary to assume that you're going to a different harmonic structure every time you change chords. For stuff that clearly fits within a key and functions in something like a "standard" way, I think it's easier to use the parent key/tonality approach (see some of Chris Fitzgerald's theory stickies above), and just make selections from within the parent scale on the basis of where you are at the moment. You don't necessarily have to think that you're going to a different mode of the major scale.

For example, if you take the simple C major progression I mentioned, on the C chord your chord tones are the 1 3 5 of the C scale, or C E G; these then are your "preferred" notes, with the C being often, but not always, the strongest. When you hit the Dm, you can simply select different preferred notes from within the same set--namely, D F A, your chord tones. Same with G--G B D. The idea is that you think of yourself as being within a single tonality, but you make different selections from your "pool" of notes to convey the harmonic and melodic movement that's happening. (This is not to say that you can use only the preferred notes with a given chord, it's just to say that the preferred chordal notes are your basis, your starting point. Clearly players often use nonchordal, and sometimes nondiatonic notes in their lines. But that's another subject.)

One possible drawback of this approach is that it could conceivably be interpreted to mean that all you have to do is wander around in C through the whole thing. But that's not what I mean at all. No random wandering--*intelligent selection* is the key. You can't just play any old thing within the set C D E F G A B. Think of it as something like a phone number. You only have 10 possible digits, but you can select from them intelligently to create distinct phone numbers. And if you dial wrong, you don't get the person you were trying to call.

Now, obviously, this doesn't explain anything like the whole picture with regard to playing over or under chords (not that I think I'm capable of commanding the "whole picture," whatever that may be, anyway). This is only a nibble off the end of the enchilada. There are times--many times, in the various types of popular music--where you don't *want* to play purely diatonically, where the music in fact demands that you don't (cf. blues). Also, there are many many tunes in which there isn't one and only one parent tonality through out the piece; many tunes have more than one.

Let's leave those things for another day, or for better explicators than I am. I'll just say that in such cases, a parent tonality may be hard to identify or absent entirely or not even an applicable concept, and the "different mode for different chord" approach is often useful and even preferable.