If You're Learning Modes On Guitar. Do This!

to understand modes you have to hear the modes okay guys critical now the modes are one of these mysterious things people get lost with the idea of modes they are conflated to be this difficult thing but they aren't really because just by adding an o into the word mode you can get the idea of what a mode does its function its purpose the reason we talk about modes is because we want to tap into the moods to really understand what the modes are you have to hear them hearing the modes is the way that we understand them because otherwise we have no context i mean it's okay saying yes something is phrygian or whatever if you know what i'm on about here with these the modes in order uh you can you can remember it with this little phrase i don't particularly like modes a lot yeah i d p l m a l yeah it pull mal you could remember it that way the order of the seven modes if you have no idea what the modes are guys then then this is basically i'm just gonna show you some moods that you can play on the guitar and it's really simple what we're going to do is we're going to offer this e string here this e string here is the counter point to everything that we play and this because this ear this e here is the foundation note what you'll hear is you'll hear discord or con chord dis means against and con means with so the the sound of the notes will either sound with the e string or they will sound against it and if it sounds against that's the tension idea and then if it's with it's this releasing idea because i'm doing this using my e string here what i'm going to do is i'm going to play a mode pattern at the seventh fret because this is an e so if i go a b c d e you can see that's an e there this is an e here this open e here there's an octave between those two there but because i'm using this e string as my reference then what you'll get is a good resolution now as i've talked about octaves before we're going to use the ear shaped octave and to find the a-shaped octave if you take this e here this note you move up two frets over two strings then you find the octave so this is an e this is an a this is an e so those are three e's there guys and what i have said in previous videos before is that when we do these octaves we can think of the octaves as being bookends if we think of them as being bookends then the idea is we can put the books that we want in between there they could be i'm going to sneeze i'm not going to sneeze they're going to be cookery books they could be books on maths and physics they could be music books they could be books on ancient egypt it could be anything that you want in there but the thing is the subject of those books is going to determine the sound of what's inside these bookmarks now like i say there are seven modes there are seven modes yeah and of those six of them are super useful you will use them all the time the seventh one which is called locrian it's a bit of a tough one to to really sell but we we might do it just for the sake of completion but the thing i want you to do is i want you to think of this bookmark here and then what we're going to do is we're going to play a minor pentatonic pattern now this is the thing the pentatonic is a skeleton and if you add extra notes to it you will get other scales the minor pentatonic scale here if i add extra notes to it two more notes to be specific i will get another scale and those scales are what we call the modes without getting too technical into in this because what i want to do is i want to play these for you so that you can hear the sound and you can hear the quality of the mood and think do i dig that sound is that something i want to add to my vocabulary right now um would it be something nice to play around with so the first mode in that sequence i don't particularly like modes a lot or it pull mouth is ionian ionian is another word for major so essentially if i play a major scale don't worry guys i'll put a little pdf together and i'll put a link in this video here if i play this here [Music] then you can see we've got that full major scale dory me faster now that sounds cool on its own but to give it context like i said we wring out this e string [Music] do [Music] and you can hear there just by offering that e string and i was playing some [Music] thirds in there as well which are very very pretty and some other little two note shapes that give it context to make it more musical you can hear [Music] that's quite pleasant and happy and that is the sound of the ionian or the major if you will i'm just going back a minute again sorry just backtracking a little bit there because i did say that the pentatonic i mentioned the pentatonic so we have the major pentatonic that lives in there as well and by adding yeah so if we have the major pentatonic by adding this little shape in the middle we get that ionian or major scale [Music] the major pentatonic you should know the major pentatonic because it sounds like my girl [Music] now the second mode is a minor mode and what we do is we build that around the skeleton of the minor pentatonic which is this [Music] now we add two more notes to that these are still within the confines of our book ends here [Music] there is the second mode which is the dorian mode now if you listen to this one [Music] we've got this minor pentatonic pattern here but what we do is we add a major second and a major sixth so we're adding those two notes those are the two notes that we add to the minor pentatonic to get [Music] now if i play a minor seven chord there you can hear that it gives us this jazzy quality yeah now if i play it with the jazz rhythm now here's a little tip guys this is how you play jazz rhythm you say the word slicer pizza yes sir slice a pizza slice of pizza so you can hear you get that jazziness to it but it for me also sounds very sort of old english sort of english you know scarborough affair that kind of thing [Music] it's a really really mellow minor scale so it's quite dark but it's a good one so far just to recap we've got [Music] bookmarks here's the dorian [Music] there's the bookmarks again so like i say i'm shifting what kind of books i have inside those bookends there sorry book bookends so we've got those there now the next mode is phrygian so the phrygian yeah has the same minor pentatonic pattern inside it but it's got a flat second there because that's so close to the root we get the jaws thick which means there's tension because i'm sure john williams wouldn't have written it if it had a an optimistic major second no yeah we want this there's the flat third and we also get this minor sixth as well [Music] there we go [Music] and you can also hear with this one i kind of think of this as one as being the spanish minus if i played [Music] that's called a phrygian cadence yeah so you know you can hear this gets used a hell of a lot in heavy metal as well so the phrygian is one if you love your metal phrygian is one that you definitely need to learn but there is the quality of that scale it still belongs to an e minor chord if i turn it to an e major [Music] then i get a bit more dramatic sort of spanish-ish sound yeah [Music] so we get that there right so that is phrygian right we're on to the fourth mode here so we've done ionian dorian phrygian the fourth mode is called lydian i love the names of these apparently they are greek tribes i wouldn't put too much value in the names of them they don't really mean anything they're just names of greek tribes because these are called the church words all the greek modes so what we'll do is we play that major pentatonic like we did before but what we're going to do is we're going to take a major scale i'm going to take the fourth note i'm going to sharpen it we're going to have a sharp 4 in there and this is the brightest of all the modes is this one and you can hear when i hit that sharp four against that root note it's there's quite a lot of tension because we're getting the tritone there which is the devil's intervals also known as the devil's interval we get that one in there [Music] you can hear that's kind of got this kind of spacey sound if you if you ever heard stuff by joe satriani or steve those guys love the lydian and in fact i think if you think frank zappa he loved the lydian as well so [Music] and it also gets used in jazz as well so it has multiple uses but the mood of it it's slightly unsettling if you listen [Music] back to those bookends again so you can see i'm just playing all this in one position guys you know that i like to say though i'll bang a pdf up and enough and go back to that lydian just to kind of reiterate the lydian there what that is it's basically a major scale with a sharp four so if you've got a major scale which is root second third fourth fifth sixth seventh yeah then all you do is you turn the four into a sharp four and then you found lydian that's the way it works so that's the difference between the two so after lydian the fifth mode and the fifth mode is a special case because this belongs to chord five and the chord five mode well you know what it's a major mode and it lives inside that it lives inside that major pentatonic again that skeleton of the that pentatonic lives there now this is really useful to know as well for where you might want to put pentatonix you know in a murder manner as well so it's it's a really cool thing to get your head around now like the lydian is fairly simple to remember because it's a major scale with a sharp four the the uh um chord five mode here the mixolydian is easy to remember as well because it's a major scale with a flat seven now the net result is is it doesn't resolve with the t dough when we listen to a major scale it goes [Music] that need for the resolution there so that's the seventh so what we have to do with that seventh is to drop it down one yeah there's no such feeling there of that resolution yeah so if i play that scale now offering the e string for context [Music] sometimes i think it could be quite bagpipe can mix lydian [Music] but you can hear it's got a pretty uh a pretty cool sound to it now if you want to play blues if i put an e7 chord there that's the scale that goes with [Music] but you it even see some of the scale notes live inside the chord as well so they cross over [Music] what i did was i played the blues scale in that position which is what you might play over a seventh chord coming from that e there but you might want it to be not so dark if you listen to the blues minor here yeah that flat third makes it quite dark whereas if i play that mixolydian that major third lifts because that's in the chord as well [Music] so hopefully you can see that mixolydian is there so so far so just to recap again ionian which is a major mode dorian which is a minor mode phrygian which is a minor mode lydian which is a major mode mixolydian which is a major mode we've got three major modes so far and two minor modes we've got one more minor mode to come and that is aeolian which is also known as the natural minor or the relative minor so it has a few different names not to be confused that has been separate things they are the same thing so [Music] where we play that pentatonic before now on this scale what we do it's not as dark as phrygian but it's quite emotive and if you think people like gary moore and soulful sort of uh sad ballads and souls on that kind of stuff then this is the one that you're looking for the aeolian mode the aeolian mode works beautifully with the minor blues scale and the minor pentatonic as well what we get is we get this major second flat third fourth fifth flat six flat seven and then we get the root again there's my book ends [Music] so we can see that that gives us a completely different sound go through these you know systematically in one position part of this thing is is memorizing these scales as well i kind of gave you a method to memorize the scales quickly that video it's up on youtube but this is [Music] major here's dorian same e string that's underpinning it all that e there is giving it context here's phrygian [Music] the next one is going to be lydian [Music] there's lydian here's uh mixolydian [Music] i understand that i think the grateful dead use a lot of mixolydian as well [Music] so you can see that it's got that major quality but it's not twee see that's the same idea there but i changed it to be [Music] as a mixolydian way of playing it it's a different context you can hear [Music] then we get the aeolian [Music] it's a lovely scale is the aioli and it's one that i think after you've learned your minor pentatonix and your blues scale aeolian is the one to go to next for the sake of completion i'm going to play the locrian but you'll hear that it isn't actually that nice and the reason being is i get to explain why with the intervals thing you know so we still have the same book ends we've got a flat second flat third fourth flat fifth which we know it gives us that sound there that tension sound so we've got jaws here we've got the devil's interval yeah we also have a minor six which is quite clashy a minor seven and then we get the root again so if i play that all together it's horrible into it so [Music] that bit there [Music] oh but the thing is knowing the formula if you accidentally play it then you know how to avoid it this is what you've got to practice sit down with the sheets that i'm going to upload and go through each pattern slowly learn the patterns see the patterns it's all in one position so it's really really easy so and then what you can do is listen it's all about listening what is the mood of the mood because the thing is to understand modes you have to hear the modes okay guys that's critical that's the main thing that you need to be able to do which mode is the one that does it for you which which mode do you like the sound of the most let me know in the comment section okay guys take care hit subscribe for more guitar tips

Channel: Ricky Comiskey

Views: 26,876

Keywords: guitar modes, guitar modes and how to use them, guitar modes explained, guitar modes explained simply, guitar modes for beginners, guitar modes lesson, guitar modes made easy, how to learn modes, modes for guitar, modes guitar, modes lesson, modes music theory, modes of the major scale, phrygian mode, dorian mode, modes explained, how modes sound, modes on guitar, what are modes on guitar, modes of guitar, modes on the guitar

Id: 1Vf9_OVr3yM

Length: 22min 24sec (1344 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 19 2021