The 7 Strange Scales Nobody Talks About

so we all know the modes of the major scale they're the most common ones that we hear about they're the most common ones that we tend to use things like dorian lydian aeolian or natural minor and even weirder ones like phrygian or locrian they have tons of different usages we see them all the time but let's think about really quickly what is a mode of the major scale sometimes we think of it as starting the major scale from any different point in that scale well when we put it that way why can't we just start to any scale from any point within itself wouldn't that also be a mode of that particular scale well you're absolutely right and that's what we're gonna go over a little bit of today so first things first let's take a look at what i would probably call the next most common usage of modes those are the modes of the melodic minor scale really quickly let's review what a melodic minor scale is let's take a major scale if we change one single note about that scale to make it minor what note is that going to be well we take our third which gives us that major sound in the key of c major and we make it flat and that gives us a minor sound in the key of c major well now let's just play the scale again only instead of playing the major third let's go ahead and play the minor third that is the melodic minor scale now here's where things get interesting with modes just the same way that the major scale has modes starting on every degree of it so does the minor scale let's take a look at what they are and what they sound like as with all scales first and foremost we have the root mode the scale itself which in this case well that's just the melodic minor scale but things get really interesting the second we start to play the different modes of this scale let's play the melodic minor scale starting from the second degree so the second degree the melodic minor scale is d now we're going to play the same notes that we did in the root position all normal except for an e flat but we're just going to start it from d that's going to sound like this really interesting sound we call this dorian flat two and it's basically exactly what it sounds like it is the dorian mode which is the second mode of the major scale only we have a flat two within that now if we back it up one step further and remind ourselves how we create a dorian scale we'll remember that we build our modes based on the variations from the major scale which is kind of what we base most of music on well if we started this scale on d let's just play a d major scale first let's find dorian and if you remember from previous videos or if you've happened to have taken the modes course over on the cornell music academy you'll remember that dorian is composed with a flat three and a flat seven so let's go back to our major scale we're gonna make a flat three so one two three make that flat four five six seven make that flat right so we wind up with okay so there's dorian and then we said that the second mode of the melodic minor scale is dorian with a flat two take that same scale again and go to our two one two make it flat there's our e flat that exists in our melodic minor scale in the key of c dorian flat 2 that's how we arrive at all of those fancy names and complicated formulas it's not that complicated it's just a lot of steps to keep track of like we start at the major scale make some alterations arrive at a mode make more alterations arrive at a mode of the melodic miter scale this is going to be a theme that we see come up again and again as we talk about the modes of the melodic minor scale dorian flat 2 has a really cool sound it sounds like this it definitely feels minor but it also has this like little twinge of mystery to it super cool scale let's move on third mode of the melodic minor scale one two three here we go same notes as the root melodic minor scale but starting on the third this one's really cool we call this lydian augmented okay so once again we have our lydian scale which is derived from our major scale by adding a sharp four in addition to starting from that lydian mode now we're going to augment it and for those of you who are not familiar augmented usually just means a sharp five so now we have a sharp four from the lydian scale and a sharp five this one's really cool it has a very mysterious sound check this out [Music] that's a super cool sound moving on we have the fourth mode of the melodic minor scale and that is going to be another variation on lydian so the fourth degree of that melodic minor scale starts on f alright so let's make f lydian remember lydian is sharp four there's our sharp four once we add our note from the melodic minor scale which if we remember is e flat so let's change out the e that's normally in f lydian and let's change that out for an e e-flat there we go we call this one lydian dominant lydian dominant remember our dominant is our flat seven so we basically just mush those together and call it one scale lydian dominant this scale is a lot more commonly used than people sometimes remember because if i play a dominant chord with a sharp 11 which is the same as a 4 right sharp 4 sharp 11 same note the scale that's gonna go with that is lydian dominant it just makes the most sense right if i'm playing we might expect to hear that as part of a 2-5-1 so for example perfect fit over that dominant seventh with a sharp 11 chord which we see so often used in jazz in particular but also across many different genres another one that might sound a little bit familiar is the fifth mode of the melodic minor scale which of course starts from g so once again let's take those notes of that bass melodic minor scale and just start them from g this again has a pretty simple name it's just kind of mushed together with like the mode of the major scale that we started with and how we changed it to make it a mode of the minor scale so we start with mixolydian and how did we make it minor well the only thing we changed in the melodic minor scale is moving that e to an e flat so let's add that in to our mixolydian scale [Music] and there we have the fifth mode of the melodic minor scale which we call mixolydian flat six it sounds complicated right if i just spat that out in conversation like oh yeah it's mixolydian flat six you'll get it you'll hear it don't worry about it but it's what we're just taking the mode of the major scale that we started with and literally saying what we changed about it to make it a mode of the melodic minor scale so mixolydian flat six and it might sound a little bit familiar because it kind of sounds like this [Music] very mysterious very dreamy and it makes really great usage of check this out the minor iv chord right because if we're seeing if we're thinking about this all in g then we have one two three four c minor built on that all the notes between those two chords are within the mixolydian flat six scale such a beautiful scale [Music] moving on to our sixth mode of the melodic minor scale we have aeolian flat five so it's aeolian but with a flat five one two three four five let's make that flat that one's a real interesting one it sounds kind of because we're lacking the fifth we got rid of that and that's obviously a very strong sort of base point but we got rid of that now we have a tritone as our sort of makes so we can't even let go because there's no fifth there's only very unsettled sound a little bit mysterious but kind of in a dark way because we're dealing with a minor chord at the you know at the very basis of it but then we have this which makes it even weirder tell me if you know any usages or popular you know areas where alien flat 5 is used because i can't think of a ton it's not a very familiar sounding scale it's pretty strange not as strange as the seventh mode of the melodic minor scale which weirdly it's actually used more than you would think and i'll explain let's take a look at that seventh mode this seventh mode of the melodic minor scale is often referred to as the altered scale or sometimes super locrian what an awesome name for skip for a scale that is super low korean as we know the seventh mode of the major scale is locrian and we know that consists of a flat 2 flat 3 flat 5 flat 6 and flat 7 which is a lot of alterations but we have to make another alteration to make this fit into the melodic minor scale and that is making our e an e flat so now we have a flat two flat three flat four flat five flat six flat seven and i'm back to a one it's a very strange combination of notes but the seventh mode of the melodic minor scale is actually a very commonly used scale over a dominant chord and part of the reason for that is it actually contains our dominant seventh shell it contains the one the major third and the flat seven now why do we not necessarily call it just a third why did we say it was kind of a flat fourth well because we also have c and d which would realistically be the flat two and the flat three but then we also have the regular natural three the major third and then a flat five flat six flat seven there's a lot of flats this is a super cool scale to use over a dominant chord because we kind of outline we have the dominant shell like we said but we also have the sharp nine and the flat nine we have a sharp 11 we have a flat 13. so this was really like playing a b7 flat 9 sharp 9 sharp 11 flat 13 all of the alterations this every single one all the alterations in context here's what that would sound like let's do a 2 5 1 where the 5 is gonna land on our b right so that would make it wow out of context that sounds so different but that's basically what we're doing [Music] okay so we're doing a 2-5-1 into e so let's make some alterations here now this is just a regular b7 with a ninth just a regular dominant chord right well let's start throwing in all these alterations let's start with just the flat nine [Music] well you can almost hear a really nice inner voice movement there [Music] it's kind of a nice uh little chromatic resolution there but we don't have just a flat nine we also have a sharp knife whoa now things are getting a little weird when we hear it like that it kind of makes sense sharp 9 flat 9 resolve [Music] we've kind of heard that sound before but we got to keep going because we also have a sharp 11. [Music] now we're starting to get into the weeds that's actually a really really sick chord that sounds awesome and if i were to play that in context i might like shift some of the voices so i'd land there and then maybe move from it so like [Music] something i don't know something like that but we're not done because not only do we have a sharp 11 we have a flat 13 as well right so let's get that in there [Music] now you probably wouldn't voice it like this specifically i mean you could for sure there's no reason you can't that flat 13 gives a pretty nice resolution to the e major because we have [Music] that's pretty nice i like that i like that sound so we have flat 9 sharp 9 sharp 11 513 and when we just throw it all into a scale we get we get that seventh mode of the melodic minor scale aka our altered scale aka super locrian what a crazy combination of sounds and color tones like you could just do so much with that there is this whole other bank of incredible sounds that we just don't really think about all that often play around with them a little bit see what kind of sounds you can build from them and see if you can recognize the usages of any of these modes and some of your favorite music now these modes are a little bit complicated but if you just want to figure out the modes of the major scale how to use them and understand that we actually have a course all about that on the corner music academy our making sense of modes course and it's available now for 30 off using code music theory 30 at check out there's a link down in the description below and that link will actually take you to our intro to piano course which if you're just starting out that's the place to start you can find links to both of those courses as well as our intro to improv course and many other things are on the way very soon once again 30 off using code music theory 30 link in the description be sure to check that out it's the best way you can support the channel and i'm super appreciative to all of you and i will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Charles Cornell

Views: 401,073

Keywords: Charles, Charles Cornell, Charles Cornell Studios, Studios, Cornell, Piano, Piano Covers, Piano guy, Music theory, lesson, piano lesson, jazz lesson, jazz theory, modes, melodic minor, minor scales, scales, melodic minor modes

Id: wWrHUSdWz6g

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 18 2022