Demonstrating All 7 Modes in Parallel [MODAL MUSIC THEORY]

I've worked with a lot of students that already know about the modes of the major scale but they're having trouble figuring out why did they learn the modes of the major scale what's the point and what are you supposed to do with these so that's really what I want to tackle in this video and I'm going to demonstrate to you each mode what's the point of each mode how does it feel what does it do and in my opinion this is extremely important it gives you freedom and it gives you options as a lead guitar player to really color the tone of what you're playing over you're not just stuck to sounding bluesy with pentatonic minor or sounding happy with major you really get some options here and some really cool options each one of these modes has its own unique identity and its own unique Flair and being able to access that whenever you want as a lead player or as a composer I feel is invaluable so with just a little bit of work with our modes we should be able to kind of harness that energy and apply it where we need in order to do that though we will need to have a little bit of theory under our belts so in this video I'm going to start off with a little light theory on how the modes are built then I'll demonstrate to you each mode one at a time so you can really get a grasp of how it feels and how to identify it then afterward we'll talk a little bit of the heavier music theory that goes along with playing modes like we will be playing them in this video ok so to get started we really want to know what are the modes of the major scale and here's how I want you to think about it there's a lot of ways to think about it but essentially I could make a major scale by following this sequence of half steps and whole steps a half step is just one fret or one note and a whole step is two frets or two notes so I want to start on G ok I'll be playing in G everything today I'll be in G major G Lydian G everything so I'm gonna start on G that's my route and if I do a travel a whole step another whole step a half step and half-step it gives me my G major scale also known as G Ionian now if I want the second mode of the major scale all I have to do is offset this pattern of half steps and whole steps by one and by doing that it will give me a whole different sequence of half steps and whole steps and a whole different sequence of notes alright to get the third mode of the major scale all I would do is the same thing just offset it by one and I get a whole different sequence of notes keep going through this you'll have all seven modes and you'll notice they all start on G today I'm setting them all up on G so you can see the differences between them now if you pay close attention you'll see that six of these modes contain the notes G and D and the jam track I'll be playing over is just those two notes it's just a G power chord G and D which means that I can play any of these modes over my jam track however I cannot play the Locrian mode over this jam track and you probably see why in my Locrian mode I only have a D flat I do not have a D note to play now Locrian is its own beast but there's a lot to talk about regarding Locrian because it's kind of the odd man out in this situation alright so now that we have all of the seven modes there what's important to know is what is the tonic chord in each of these modes what is the Homebase chord in each of these keys and it might seem obvious but you just kind of have to look in G major for example the first mode of the major scale G Ionian all we have to do to figure out the tonic chord is just look at the first note the second note I'm sorry the first note the third note and the fifth note by looking at one three and five it'll tell you the notes of my tonic chord that is G B D and if I play G's B's and DS it's a teenager so my tonic chord of G major is the G major chord however look at my second mode alright Dorian you can see that if I look at the first note the third note and the fifth note I actually get G B flat and D which means the home chord of G Dorian would be a G minor chord alright that's important as I'm gonna be soloing and showing you these modes I'm gonna be outlining the tonic chord with my lead guitar I'm not just gonna be playing up and down the scale I'm gonna try to be I'm gonna try to highlight the notes of the tonic chord to help really fill in the context of what key I'm n okay and that's really important is knowing that one of these modes has a home cord that you want to focus on and as you can see the home cord of major Lydian and mixolydian is a major chord the home cord of Dorian Phrygian and minor is a minor chord and once again we have the odd man out the tonic chord of Locrian is going to be a diminished triad so you might be able to guess it's not going to be very harmonic if you're spending the whole time hanging out on a diminished triad which kind of you might be getting the problem with Locrian already but we'll talk about that later now that we have an idea of the theory behind how I'm building these things up all starting them from the same root all starting them on G it's time to actually show you what these things sound like so once again my jam track is just playing G and D that's a G power chord and I want to go through each one of these scales I'll go up the scale and then I'll do a little bit of improvising so you can actually hear the tone and the color develop for each one of these modes all right let's start off with major [Music] so you might be able to hear major is very happy it's very bright it's almost sickeningly happy I think of classical music I think of Health Insurance commercials anything that's supposed to make you feel you know elated and overjoyed major it gets kind of bland and it takes some work to really sound interesting with major if you're trying to avoid that really sweet saccharine sound however if you're looking for nice big melodies and really singable choruses you're never gonna go wrong with major but you've heard major before so let's go on to something a little bit more distinct and that would be the Dorian scale let's take a listen to that one [Music] so Dorian's kind of weird right it's not really evil and dark like a minor scale it's kind of got this kind of smooth silky I always think of Carlos Santana Carlos Santana's jams and songs a lot of them are in Dorian and they're minor because they're you know cool and dark they're not overjoyed but they've got a little bit of flair to it a little bit of bite a little bit of spice put into that minor it's not just a dark and depressing and rocking minor it's got a little bit more pep to it so I have to point out that the real important note in Dorian is that natural sixth note normally in a minor scale I'd have a flat 6 but in Dorian it's a natural 6 and it gives it that major lift it gives it that little brightness that we don't expect and when I'm improvising in Dorian I try to make it a point to to get back to that note it's just the right times to remind people hey I'm not in Minor I'm in Dorian and it kind of brightens things up a little bit so let's move on to Phrygian [Music] [Music] [Applause] so that is pretty interesting you can hear Phrygians got a very exotic flavor to it like a middle-eastern foreign flavor to it and that's really potent my jam track used to be this bland boring to note thing but now the jam track itself actually feels dark and deep and kind of mysterious right and that's because the Phrygian mode has colored your ear I've outlined the notes of that minor chord the G minor chord and I have this note which is a flat - I have an A flat in there so these two notes right next to each other give you a really really dark flavor right so cool option for soloing over just one note or just a power chord is the Phrygian choice and really the note you would want to be highlighting there is that flat - so going back to something with a major tonality let's take a look at the Lydian mode [Music] I'll admit this is my favorite mode it's very dreamy disoriented disconnected floaty and that comes from the fact that we have a major triad a G a B and a D that's our tonic chord but we also have a tritone which is a sharp 4 or a diminished right and just that combination nation of notes gives you a very sci-fi kind of otherworldly feel so anytime I'm trying to access that kind of emotion I know that Lydian is a good place to start let's take a look at the next one with major tonality that would be mixolydian [Music] I do love mixolydian it's like major but it's kind of watered-down it doesn't have that sickening sweetness of major it's much more palatable and it's way more fun and rocking and almost like an Irish flair to it I found out just this week that the bagpipes are actually tuned to a natural mixolydian scale so it makes sense that it you know it reminds me of Irish music because I've heard it so much in traditional bagpipe music so the mixolydian scale is pretty much the same thing as a major scale we've just flatted that 7th note and that takes away the leading tone of major right and that was the leading tone right that really pulls us to a root now we have a flat 7 which gives us kind of a more I don't know unexpected feeling right and it definitely dilutes the happiness of my major scale so once again a very cool option if you're stuck with just jamming over a power cord if major sounding too bright and happy just try bringing in that mixolydian scale instead and you'll get something with a little bit more upbeat attitude and it's still bright and happy but just not dripping with with emotion you know all right now let's take a look at the natural minor or Aeolian mode [Music] so you've probably heard stuff like this before this is the foundation of most of our rock and roll music it's kind of traditional at this point I can't really put my finger on it other than it's dark but it's important to be able to contrast minor with Dorian what's the difference between those two well I think minor is darker I think it's sadder I think Dorian has a little bit more optimism to it what's the difference between minor and Phrygian well that should be obvious Phrygian has a real distinct exotic flare that flat two is extremely dark and it's I think it's much darker than and then minor so hopefully those kind of words dark and light I mean I know they're not physical things but they're the words that pop into my head when I try to compare something like Phrygian to minor if my guitar player was jamming over a G power chord and if I wanted to have an exotic flare I know that Phrygian would be a better choice than minor now lastly let's talk about Locrian [Music] here's the problem if I want a jam in Locrian I need to be jamming on the home court of Locrian which would be G diminished and hanging out on a diminished chord and pretending like that's going to be your home it doesn't usually work out that well it's you could do it as an academic thing right just try to write something in Locrian but without a root and a fifth you know a runa fit those are like the two pillars of foundations for any chord so now we're just left with this and this is not stable so doing anything in Locrian is just gonna give you something weird and what's worse is it's not even that weird there's better weird scales if you're looking to sound atonal and chaotic I think there's better choices than just Locrian so to me Locrian is like the remainder it's the leftover stuff from all these awesome modes you know you got to have that leftover bad stuff and to me that's Locrian that might not be fair to describe the Locrian mode that way but I'll be completely honest with you I haven't found any use for it other than to just goof around with it and even then like I said if I want to sound goofy and chaotic I would rather pick something like whole tone or an octa tonic scale or some weird exotic scale like that so I hope this gives you a little insight into why you might want to learn your modes you can see I mean over one jam track I'm able to sound six different ways but having access to that means that when I'm composing or when I'm improvising I have more than just a few choices and I think that's really important as a musician also it is worth talking about a few other concepts that kind of dovetail into what we did here you might hear the word modal interchange or the word modal mixture essentially that's what we were doing in this video we had one tonic we had G the entire time and throughout this video I was in G major then I was in G Dorian and G Lydian and G mixolydian often when you're writing chord changes that borrow from the different parallel modes then you call that modal mixer or modal interchange some people might debate whether this modal entertains because I didn't include any chords there was just one you know power chord the entire time but the scales I'm flying I'm playing are implying different chord tones which kind of creates that feeling of motor modal mixture also if you look at all the different modes I played it contained all twelve different notes of the chromatic scale and this can be thought of as poly modal chromaticism accessing all twelve notes by changing parallel modes across one tonic and this idea is very closely related to what you might hear as pitch axis theory which is the idea of having a stable tonic like G in our case and using different chord tones to kind of launch us into different modes for example if I had a G major chord with a sharp four well I've got my G major triad and I have for all of those notes are in G Lydian so this would be kind of a launching board to play in the G Lydian key likewise if I all of a sudden played a G minor seven chord all of those notes are in G Dorian or an G minor so I could use a G minor seven chord to kind of spring into that new mode the whole idea of pitch access theory though is that you are rotating on one tonic just like in this video so I really hope this clear some things up for you and maybe gives you some inspiration on your own lead writing and your own songwriting as to how to utilize this stuff it's really important to learn music theory in my opinion but it's really important to be able to use it this stuff isn't for factoids or for trivia it's not something you'd you know recite you know just for the sake of having the knowledge it's ways of describing things that work and as you can hear all those things work and music theory is just giving me a label to remember how it worked and how I can recreate it again so I hope you learned something from this and I hope you enjoyed this video if you do like this video please like subscribe you know what to do and I will see you in the not-so-distant [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 1,443,756

Keywords: jake lizzio, dole mansion, crystal lake, free lesson, guitar lesson, cool guitar, play solos, how to play guitar, modes, music modes, scale modes, music theory, modal mixture, modal interchange, borrowed scales, borrowed chords, learn the modes, mode solos, guitar modes, piano modes, modal theory, building modes, how to play modes, why are modes important, how do modes sound, how do modes feel, music theory lesson, music theory emotion, music theory documentary

Id: bwaeBUYcO5o

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 16 2018