Is this dagger pointed at moi? :-/
OK, yeah, maybe I'm getting emotional. Not quite sure why.... Thanks for calling me on that
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the myth of modes
- Thread starter HandsFree
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OK, yeah, maybe I'm getting emotional. Not quite sure why.... Thanks for calling me on that
Yes--you are totally right--I suppose I mean in the context of the lines I play--I don't get much of a chance to throw a modal line in (maybe on two tunes out of 50)--and our piano player and fiddle player don't go that route really during their solos.
Now, my buddy who plays sax--he's working in modes all the time, and I enjoy what he does with them.
Now, my buddy who plays sax--he's working in modes all the time, and I enjoy what he does with them.
When I'm playing in Jazz trios and quartets, I usually get a solo 2 out of every 3 pieces we play. When we are just jamming, I solo on every tune. Knowing the modes and how to resolve them is absolutely vital to me.
one of the hallmarks of my playing is the liberal use of pentatonic scales sprinkled with 'key' colour notes along the way.
it comes down to what sounds good and pentatonics sound good in most things.
I love taking a major pentatonic lick and perhaps throwing in a b7 or a min3rd. sometimes a maj7th adds the colour I need.
maybe I will play a maj pentatonic over a passage and throw in a #4th for some Lydian colour.
pentatonics can imply modality-
for example-
if say I am in Dmin- and I want to add a min9th quality to it for openness, I can play Amin pentatonic which emphasises the E. this would also remove the b3rd and give the passage some ambiguity but maybe that is the effect you want; it avoids the b6 which is a strong note in a minor passage. sometimes, that's what you want.
maybe you want to embellish the b3rd and b6th in Dmin so you opt for a Gmin pentatonic over D...
perhaps you are in Dmin and you want to give it a Dorian vibe-
you could play Emin pentatonic which embellishes the B which is the natural 6th.
; this also removes the b3rd but you can always add a note if that's what you want.
these are real simple examples here but I use them all the time to great effect. I rarely use full scales; selective notes are more tasteful as are chord tones.
it comes down to what sounds good and pentatonics sound good in most things.
I love taking a major pentatonic lick and perhaps throwing in a b7 or a min3rd. sometimes a maj7th adds the colour I need.
maybe I will play a maj pentatonic over a passage and throw in a #4th for some Lydian colour.
pentatonics can imply modality-
for example-
if say I am in Dmin- and I want to add a min9th quality to it for openness, I can play Amin pentatonic which emphasises the E. this would also remove the b3rd and give the passage some ambiguity but maybe that is the effect you want; it avoids the b6 which is a strong note in a minor passage. sometimes, that's what you want.
maybe you want to embellish the b3rd and b6th in Dmin so you opt for a Gmin pentatonic over D...
perhaps you are in Dmin and you want to give it a Dorian vibe-
you could play Emin pentatonic which embellishes the B which is the natural 6th.
; this also removes the b3rd but you can always add a note if that's what you want.
these are real simple examples here but I use them all the time to great effect. I rarely use full scales; selective notes are more tasteful as are chord tones.
But make sure you demonize anyone who disagrees with you right? How is this BS comment not you being a provocateur?
How about you grow up and either ignore me or address the content of what I actually say say?
You have repeatedly been a jerk towards me and I have not done anything to you except disagree with some of your points.
Grow up.
Yes, YES, YES!
Exactly, compo-frikkin'-sition.
If you are a bassist, this simply does not concern you.
Inversions? Learn them! Slash chords? They were invented for you!
Modes? Unless you are a student and seeker of musical truths--not technique--not (necessarily) intervals, do not concern yourself with this.
Bass is a bridge--a buffer, between the drum's, the songs, staccato and groove, and the guitar's/piano's (as the case may be, respectively) searing, plaintive, assertive, wistful, regretful, majestic, joyous cry.
If you try to perform the same function as the guitar, you will F**ck the song up!
Slash chords were invented for bass. You know why? Because you aren't supposed to be creating the melody...you are to support.
There is no dishonor in that. You are not less important. Get over your frikkin inferiority complexes. Assuming you are worth your salt, and you respect your position, guitarists love you! They couldn't express the beautiful music they hear in their souls without the blanket you lay down to buffer and stabilize the discordance between the drum's spiky, or feathery or off-beat (as the case may be) fundamentals,... and the loose, searching, warbling, etc.. (as the case may be) melody.
Yes, I know. Michael Manring, Wooten, Jaco, etc... (not most of us here...), compose music. But, I am certain 100 percent which side of this divide they stand on...
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You know what? I just realized that my previous respnse was more of a rant rather than a mature and direct answer to your wonderful question.
I will answer this concisely in due time, my friend.
For now, I need to tend to my children
And yet I have NEVER said anything even close to that.
There is one rule: make it sound good.
Music theory is descriptive, not descriptive.
Which of ANY of the points I've actually made, not the ones you insist on making up, justifies your personal attacks, putting words in my mouth, and taking everything I actually do write in the worst possible light again?
have you ever actually had an argument where you didn;t have to resort to this kind of crap?
Could you help me to understand your statement?
You get nothing else from me without an apology first.
You could use actual words I write for any number of things, but yet again make an effort to paint me as something more than someone who disagrees with you without them.
I'm done with you. You officially are either too dumb or too mean spirited to bother with.
Anyone else is free to read what I have actually written as well, including the answer to his most recent question, which I dealt with many pages ago or to contact me privately.
I guess it depends where we are. With respect to the OP, I think we went from "modes don't matter" to borderline "they are a myth and barely even exist" and back again. Like just about everything, I believe the answer lies somewhere in the balance; the middle ground between not knowing or caring, and understanding / using them. Depending on your goals, how you learn, and who/where you learn from... sh!t we'll all have varying answers. I'll reiterate that they helped me learn the locations of notes on the neck, and how to throw in occasional non-chord tones that still work under any given chord. I look forward to advancing that understanding:
Therefore "my point," seeing as I doubt there will be "A (final) point," is that of course they exist whether you know of or acknowledge them or not (our beloved major and minor scales are just two of the seven afterall), and their usefulness also varies greatly based on many factors.
Modes, by virtue of sharing all the tones of their 'parent' scale,
and having the natural chord tones of their root in the key signature,
can be found everywhere
(If modes are the filter through which you look)
because they can be found everywhere,
Modes give the impression that they are important
(note this argument also holds for many patterns of theory)
The only real debate is over how important modes really are to study or consider when analyzing music.
I honestly thought I couldn't possibly have anything to contribute to a thread 13-pages-long and counting, but having finished reading, I actually might, even if it's just recombining points already touched upon or implied by others.
The way I see it, but I also might have borrowed the distinction somewhere (Wikipedia?), there are two related but distinct meanings to the word "mode" in music:
-modes proper are scales that get to become foundations to a musical piece, i.e. the 7-note inventories from which pitches are extracted either in melodies or/and chords. A tonal piece is in major or minor mode; a piece based on a Dorian scale is in Dorian mode (its center of gravity, finalis or what have you has to be established by some means, like pedals or ostinatos, or employing functional harmony of the kind found in tonal music - I choose to call this latter approach para-tonal, but to others everything not revolving around the perfect cadence and a prevalence of progressive root movement is dubbed "modal" even if the mode in question is the Ionian. Fair enough I guess, I don't get to decide what's called what); even a scale played in isolation is in the mode that gets the name from that scale, because there is nothing else providing context;
-in the extended sense, "mode" is shorthand for "modal scale", which in turn means "Church modes other than the Ionian, possibly including the natural minor scale". Whenever you use a given modal scale in a context that is, itself, not based on said scale, you're playing a "mode" in this second sense.
Now: in a tonal and completely diatonic context, let's say major, why should you "think" Dorian when the ii comes up in the progression? The "mode" is just one face of the seven-faced die that is the intervallic system (two non-adjacent semitones and two groups, of two and three whole-steps separating them). If I just play said system, having learnt one face of it, namely that of the mode proper (I), and then favour chord tones placing them in strong beats and/or at the extreme points of stepwise movements, and avoiding the avoid-notes...I'm kosher. A possible added benefit of this approach is that I may be more fluid in my inter-chordal phrasing.
What happens if there's quick modulation, tonicisation, borrowed dominants or other chords, or whatever best describes specific non-diatonic phenomena? It depends: sometimes you want to think in terms of the new, temporary center, or else, again, rely on chord tones and alter the basic inventory, or rather the phrases you derive from it, inasmuch as chord tones do.
On the other hand, "thinking modally" has its own strong points.
-You can teach yourself the fingerboard more effectively, as said;
-it has undeniably useful expressive functions - modal scales have their own mood, so effecting a non-functional modification of the pattern over a given chord ("diatonic mode": by way of example, playing an augmented 4th on the I of a major piece and giving it a Lydian tinge) can spice it up, towards a specific, known, atmosphere. While knowing the effect of specific note alterations to the two main modes would also do, why not use already existing concepts? Nothing prevents you to, then, compare the "modes" and focus on where each "deviates" from the two, major and minor, used in tonal music as foundations and here assumed as "norm" - in fact, that's precisely what everyone does anyway;
-related to the latter scenario is the crucially important reason to learn and use modal scales: chord substitutions in jazz. (Disclaimer: I don't play jazz myself, so all or part of the following has a significant degree of likelihood of being inaccurate bovine excretion.) Given the possibility of replacing, beforehand as a composer or arranger or improvisationally as a musician with comping duties, diatonic chords with others of equal functional value, the melodic improviser has the choice of not following the substitution, carrying out a different one, or doing one when none is present in the chart, by outlining a chord with its tones or with its corresponding mode. Again, you can do without the latter if you have command of chord tones, but in this specific situation calling for a "vertical" approach, there are no negatives to resorting to "modes" as a mnemonic resource for improvisation.
Phew.
A note on the melodic minor. It is at its core a tonal concept: the seventh of the minor mode is/becomes a leading tone, and the 6th is likewise raised to provide a melodically easier approach to the raised 7th. I have no idea if Common Practice period composers thought in terms of "ascending melodic minor" or just "raise the seventh if the tonic follows, raise the sixth if a raised seventh follows". The thing is, the ascending melodic minor happens to be a different intervallic system as defined above: the two semitones are now separated by two groups of 1 and 4 whole steps. At this point, people decided to learn and use the other six possible scales derivable from this scheme: in short, do what was done centuries ago in musical cultures that decided to expand the expressive palette by incorporating scales different from the diatonic pattern, and use them as modes, in both senses of the word in our case. (Those cultures, by the way, probably precluded themselves from developing a functional harmony, for better or worse, precisely because they didn't stick, unlike we did, with a system pre-historically derived from the circle of fifths and thus allowing more consonant chords being created, first as a byproduct of melodic polyphony and then studied and systematised.)
The way I see it, but I also might have borrowed the distinction somewhere (Wikipedia?), there are two related but distinct meanings to the word "mode" in music:
-modes proper are scales that get to become foundations to a musical piece, i.e. the 7-note inventories from which pitches are extracted either in melodies or/and chords. A tonal piece is in major or minor mode; a piece based on a Dorian scale is in Dorian mode (its center of gravity, finalis or what have you has to be established by some means, like pedals or ostinatos, or employing functional harmony of the kind found in tonal music - I choose to call this latter approach para-tonal, but to others everything not revolving around the perfect cadence and a prevalence of progressive root movement is dubbed "modal" even if the mode in question is the Ionian. Fair enough I guess, I don't get to decide what's called what); even a scale played in isolation is in the mode that gets the name from that scale, because there is nothing else providing context;
-in the extended sense, "mode" is shorthand for "modal scale", which in turn means "Church modes other than the Ionian, possibly including the natural minor scale". Whenever you use a given modal scale in a context that is, itself, not based on said scale, you're playing a "mode" in this second sense.
Now: in a tonal and completely diatonic context, let's say major, why should you "think" Dorian when the ii comes up in the progression? The "mode" is just one face of the seven-faced die that is the intervallic system (two non-adjacent semitones and two groups, of two and three whole-steps separating them). If I just play said system, having learnt one face of it, namely that of the mode proper (I), and then favour chord tones placing them in strong beats and/or at the extreme points of stepwise movements, and avoiding the avoid-notes...I'm kosher. A possible added benefit of this approach is that I may be more fluid in my inter-chordal phrasing.
What happens if there's quick modulation, tonicisation, borrowed dominants or other chords, or whatever best describes specific non-diatonic phenomena? It depends: sometimes you want to think in terms of the new, temporary center, or else, again, rely on chord tones and alter the basic inventory, or rather the phrases you derive from it, inasmuch as chord tones do.
On the other hand, "thinking modally" has its own strong points.
-You can teach yourself the fingerboard more effectively, as said;
-it has undeniably useful expressive functions - modal scales have their own mood, so effecting a non-functional modification of the pattern over a given chord ("diatonic mode": by way of example, playing an augmented 4th on the I of a major piece and giving it a Lydian tinge) can spice it up, towards a specific, known, atmosphere. While knowing the effect of specific note alterations to the two main modes would also do, why not use already existing concepts? Nothing prevents you to, then, compare the "modes" and focus on where each "deviates" from the two, major and minor, used in tonal music as foundations and here assumed as "norm" - in fact, that's precisely what everyone does anyway;
-related to the latter scenario is the crucially important reason to learn and use modal scales: chord substitutions in jazz. (Disclaimer: I don't play jazz myself, so all or part of the following has a significant degree of likelihood of being inaccurate bovine excretion.) Given the possibility of replacing, beforehand as a composer or arranger or improvisationally as a musician with comping duties, diatonic chords with others of equal functional value, the melodic improviser has the choice of not following the substitution, carrying out a different one, or doing one when none is present in the chart, by outlining a chord with its tones or with its corresponding mode. Again, you can do without the latter if you have command of chord tones, but in this specific situation calling for a "vertical" approach, there are no negatives to resorting to "modes" as a mnemonic resource for improvisation.
Phew.
A note on the melodic minor. It is at its core a tonal concept: the seventh of the minor mode is/becomes a leading tone, and the 6th is likewise raised to provide a melodically easier approach to the raised 7th. I have no idea if Common Practice period composers thought in terms of "ascending melodic minor" or just "raise the seventh if the tonic follows, raise the sixth if a raised seventh follows". The thing is, the ascending melodic minor happens to be a different intervallic system as defined above: the two semitones are now separated by two groups of 1 and 4 whole steps. At this point, people decided to learn and use the other six possible scales derivable from this scheme: in short, do what was done centuries ago in musical cultures that decided to expand the expressive palette by incorporating scales different from the diatonic pattern, and use them as modes, in both senses of the word in our case. (Those cultures, by the way, probably precluded themselves from developing a functional harmony, for better or worse, precisely because they didn't stick, unlike we did, with a system pre-historically derived from the circle of fifths and thus allowing more consonant chords being created, first as a byproduct of melodic polyphony and then studied and systematised.)
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He does this in every thread he ever participates in. You just happen to be his target in this one. Ignore him. It's not worth it.
I'm really fascinated with that short tutorial about modes.
http://www.lifesmith.com/BHWeb/Music Theory - Advanced.pdf
There are way too many paragraphs to quote.
The following is an excerpt from "Using Modes for Composition", page 16.
"The mode of a song is normally determined when you compose the song.
So, how do we use modes for composition then?
Here is an example of how to use the Phrygian Mode for composition:
http://www.lifesmith.com/BHWeb/Music Theory - Advanced.pdf
There are way too many paragraphs to quote.
The following is an excerpt from "Using Modes for Composition", page 16.
"The mode of a song is normally determined when you compose the song.
So, how do we use modes for composition then?
Here is an example of how to use the Phrygian Mode for composition:
More about using modal composition in simple words for the beginners like me.
Electronic music uses modes
"Dance music theory expert Oliver Curry introduces the concept of modes and explains why they’re relevant to electronic music."
Invalid Link Removed
"For a great example of the Phrygian mode in practice, let’s listen to the opening of ‘Organic’ by Kryptic Minds, taken from the album One Of Us. The eastern flute solo that opens the track is in a G Phrygian mode."
For a great example of the Mixolydian mode in dance music, have a listen to Todd Terje’s track ‘Inspector Norse’:
"A short primer on the creation and use of the dorian modal scale."
Invalid Link Removed
"To create song melodies and chords in the dorian mode, you’ll first want a few chord examples that you can improvise melodies over. Try these short dorian-based chord progressions. Play them over and over, and improvise melodic shapes on the notes GABbCDEFG:
And as I mentioned, it’s that note E in the chord progressions (particularly as it appears in the chord C) that will give your chords a deliciously dorian quality.
As you use the note E in your melodies, try having it move “through” E, on its way up to F, or on its way down to D.
For some examples of music in the dorian mode, give these ones a listen:
Electronic music uses modes
"Dance music theory expert Oliver Curry introduces the concept of modes and explains why they’re relevant to electronic music."
Invalid Link Removed
"For a great example of the Phrygian mode in practice, let’s listen to the opening of ‘Organic’ by Kryptic Minds, taken from the album One Of Us. The eastern flute solo that opens the track is in a G Phrygian mode."
For a great example of the Mixolydian mode in dance music, have a listen to Todd Terje’s track ‘Inspector Norse’:
"A short primer on the creation and use of the dorian modal scale."
Invalid Link Removed
"To create song melodies and chords in the dorian mode, you’ll first want a few chord examples that you can improvise melodies over. Try these short dorian-based chord progressions. Play them over and over, and improvise melodic shapes on the notes GABbCDEFG:
- Gm C Dm C :||
- Gm F Gm C :||
- Gm Dm F Gm :||
And as I mentioned, it’s that note E in the chord progressions (particularly as it appears in the chord C) that will give your chords a deliciously dorian quality.
As you use the note E in your melodies, try having it move “through” E, on its way up to F, or on its way down to D.
For some examples of music in the dorian mode, give these ones a listen:
- Eleanor Rigby (Lennon & McCartney). The melody is in E dorian (E F# G A B C# D E), though the chords avoid that major IV-chord.
- Invalid Link Removed (Santana)
- Purple Haze (Jimi Hendrix)"
And there in lies part of the problem, what is worthwhile and intuitive to one player , Is complex and confusing to another.
Now as I said we learned about mode construction, because our teachers new that we could spend so much time talking about modes and how the can apply to music, rather than learning music.
It was I suppose a cope out, but a good cope out because it did not distract us from learning sound basics and fundamental's of music.
We learned about what notes are where and what notes were available through keys, scales and chords....not modes.
I appreciate that in recent years player have many different tools to use, some of these may just be different "distraction" to learning music in a basic and foundation way.
I am glad you found them useful to explain and help you unlock ideas, and that is what they should be about.
In art Blue has many shades, different blues do different things to the same picture, and so it is with modes in music when applied to harmony and melody...they can bring out different thing we never new could be there.
I am relatively new here and tend to err on the side of giving people too much of the benefit of the doubt.
Lesson learned...again...maybe.
Yes....and many who point to one method being better than the other have often never tried both. Most, like many in this thread, don't even understand the alternative method or how they could work or work better.
Right now teaching modes/chord scale thinking is so much more the dominant mode (not to be confused with mixolydian) of instruction that many cannot even imagine another methodology working. Yet we have the oral and written history of many (most before 1950) great players to say otherwise.
Obviously a huge amount of players are simply going to suck because they have not committed to the endeavor of becoming proficient, but many, many players have put in the time and yet have not found the current trends in instruction helpful to them.
