I’ve head tremendous response to my modes lessons and I can’t wait to expand them. I got a few questions that all seemed to relate around the same question: “There’s a lot of thinking involved in your lessons, how can you play with feeling when your brain is that involved?” It’s a great question. I think about this a lot. The answer is you can’t.

Let me start off by admitting that even with all of my education and degrees in music, I’m still a 100% “play by ear” player. I can hear very deeply because I’ve been trained to listen to music and associate it to tangible ideas, such as chords, progressions and intervals. My brain taught my ears some amazing tricks, but my ears are still in charge.

In the last lesson, I used an example about the chord progression E, D and A being a mixolydian chord progression. I broke it down into small parts to illustrate the process. The truth of the matter is that I knew it was mixolydian by ear as soon as my student played the song. The fact that I can hear it doesn’t help you at all. In order for me to help you understand what mixolydian sounds like, I have to teach you to identify if in some way. If your ears can’t do it at first, your mind will inform your ears. The final goal will always be about hearing. It will always be about music. The brain does not kill the soul…

So, with all of that said, why all the theory in my lessons? Simply, I have to communicate my ideas. In this medium, I am forced to communicate in words. Teaching is the art of taking the indescribable power of music and putting it into words. It’s really hard to do. When I play onstage, the communication between musicians is aural and takes place in real-time. When the piano player plays an interesting chord substitution during my solo, there is no time to think about theory. There’s no time to spell things out on paper. You have to react instantly to what you hear. Getting to that point takes practice and experience. Getting there is indescribably cool.

The process of learning to improvise never ends. It’s my favorite part about being a musician. I hope this helps you understand where I’m coming from and what my end goals are for all of you.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Shakespeare:

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

It doesn’t matter what you call it. You can call it “The chord that expresses my pain” while I may call it “Cminor9add11/F;” the result to the listener is the same: we all feel it.

—–

Marc

In yesterdays post, I left off by talking about how I’d discovered some modes in High School, all by accident. Sadly, back then, modes didn’t seem to have much bearing in my life. My first year of music school didn’t really change that. It took the second year of school for my ears and brain to get into the idea of modes. It all started with a great teacher (as it often does).

Getting schooled

I’ve been blessed with some exceptional teachers over the years. Most didn’t play guitar, but still contributed greatly to my education as a player and as an overall musician. The second year of music school brings with it Theory III and Theory IV, which covers the romantic and modern musical eras. Both classes were taught by one of my favorite teachers at Crane, Dr. Paul Steinberg. Dr. Steinberg was not your average classical music theory professor. He was a composer who had paid the bills in college playing sax and clarinet in jazz and big bands. Rather than just sight sing dreary melodies, he pulled out The Real Book and we sang along to standards. It was wonderful. I did a lot of independent study with Dr. Steinberg to push me. We did some very advanced sight singing, including modes. It was through Dr. Steinberg that I started to hear modes on their own. I knew what they were, I had read about them in countless books. They just didn’t resonate. Until that moment, this is what I knew and what made sense about modes:

• Ionian was the major scale
• Dorian was a minor-type scale
• Phrygian was a minor-type scale
• Lydian was a major-type scale
• Mixolydian was a major-type scale
• Aeolian was the minor scale
• Locrian was a minor-type scale, but it sounded a bit funny

At that point, I was starting to codify The Efficient Guitarist method in my head. The patterns were fully formed in my head. I was finally to the point where I knew the number of the scale degree I was playing. That was a huge deal for me. I needed to make sense of the modes. I needed to relate them to what I already knew.

Relationships evolve

I had enough theory now to look at the modes and see something new: I could see the formulas. I took the list of modes and wrote down the DNA:

• Ionian is the major scale
• Dorian is minor scale with its 6th note raised
• Phrygian is a minor scale with its 2nd note lowered
• Lydian is a major scale with its 4th note raised
• Mixolydian is a major scale with its 7th note lowered
• Aeolian is the minor scale
• Locrian is the minor scale with its 2nd and 5th notes lowered

Once I had this down, everything else was easy. I had no interest in learning new scale shapes. The Efficient Guitarist shapes are simple, but they took me a bit of time to really internalize. I didn’t want to learn 5 more scales, in 5 more positions all over the neck. What I had no problem with was altering one note per scale to make the new modes. Sure it took a bit of thought to find all the 7ths to lower in mixolydian, but I found it pretty easy. All of a sudden, the shapes were feeling remarkably efficient. I had just learned all the modes, in all the keys, in all positions with a minimal amount of work. Being a lazy 19 year old, less work was fine by me.

Priority

As I was practicing these modes, I still didn’t have a ton of material to use them with, but my ear had evolved enough to start using them when I improvised. What I did right off the bat was throw a few modes away. Here’s the modes that didn’t make the cut and why:

• Phrygian: No matter how I played it, the lowered 2nd made me think of Spain or Ravi Shankar. I just couldn’t see this one coming up too often.
• Locrian: The lowered 2nd and 5th sounded so dark to me. I just didn’t like this one.

Since I already knew ionian (major) and aeolian (minor), I only had to worry about dorian, lydian and mixolydian. They seemed the most useful to me. The trick was to start learning where to use them. I didn’t have time, or room in my brain for information I wasn’t going to use. Use it or loose it was the name of the game when you try to triple major and keep playing electric guitar at level.

Jazz in Potsdam

All throughout my college years, I played in the jazz band. I started off in the lower jazz band, eventually making it into the Crane Jazz Ensemble. My first year solos were largely by ear. I wasn’t playing modes. I clearly wasn’t playing “changes” either. I had little idea what they were at that time. What I did do is start taking jazz improvisation lessons from the jazz director at Crane (the amazing Bret Zvacek) during my sophomore year. As for modes, they were all over my jazz education. I will go into modes for jazz in a later lesson; it’s a huge topic. What I finally started to understand was that modes fell into two categories. Modes you want to use and modes you need to use.  This is going to be the cornerstone of how I teach modes. Modes you need vs. modes you want and when to use them.

• Note: Each of the next sections are going to have their own lessons, eventually. For now, I want to plant the seeds.

“Want to” modes

In the first part of the lesson, I talked about trying out modes against static chords. I had recorded myself playing a D minor chord and tried out aeolian and dorian all built from the same root. I did this to figure out how the modes differed from each other.  In most real life musical situations, you don’t get to play over a single chord for a very long time. Sure, jam bands love to vamp, but rarely is it just on a single chord. It’s usually a riff or a a tonality. So, while it’s rare to have a chord in play for a long time, what you can have is situations where you want to hear a certain color/flavor over an individual chord. If you’re composing, you can absolutely choose a mode based on it mood and color and use that as the basis for your tune (just like Joe Satriani did with Flying in a Blue Dream in the last lesson).

As for want to, when you improvise, you’re able to choose the sounds you want over individual chords. You can choose a single chord in the progression and choose to pair it with a mode of your choice, just because it will change it up; just because you want to do it. If the last sentence sounded a lot like jazz to you, that’s because it’s where you’ll get to use want to modes the most. Most people improvise over keys and tonalities. Changing your scale/mode for every chord that you encounter is called playing changes, and it’s something I’m excited to talk about later on. But it’s not for everyone.

The vast majority of you will deal with modes in the next category, the have to modes.

“Have to” modes

So, what is a have to mode? When I was teaching, I always did a lot of improvisation with my students. I encouraged students to bring in music they liked to figure out what to play over it. My pedagogy would start with pentatonic scales and graduate up to 7 note scales. All too often, students would bring in songs they liked, songs they knew and loved and wanted to learn to solo over. Quite often, my students would bring in something that didn’t fit into The Efficient Guitarist Book I (which only deals with major and minor). They’d walk right into a have to mode. Let me explain.

I’m working with a student on their favorite Grateful Dead song (the title of which eludes me). The chord progression was E, D, A. It was simple enough. I knew it was modal as soon as I heard it. So, I asked the student to identify which chord felt like it was the strongest resolving chord. The chord that they felt was worthy of name root. “E,” the student correctly identified. “Great,” I said. “Let’s go ahead and play in E major and see how we do,” I instructed.

The student starts to improvise and stops suddenly. Something doesn’t sound right to him. So, what’s the issue? “There’s a really bad note,” he says.  I get up and draw the following on the white board.

• E Major = E F# G# A B C# D# E
• Chords in the song: E, D, A

He saw it immediately. The D# in the scale sounded downright horrible in the song against that D major chord. I asked him what he could do to fix the scale to make it work. I told him he only had to change one thing. He correctly made the D# into a D natural.

• New scale: E F# G# A B C# D E

The new scale was mixolydian, he just didn’t know it yet… I told him that all he had to do was take his Efficient Guitarist shapes and lower all the 7th notes down one fret and he’d be golden. He was a much happier camper and played some of his best solos that night. “That’s the scale Jerry used all the time,” I told him. That put a smile on his face.

This student had walked into a situation where he had to use a mode to get through this progression. It felt like a single key to him. It wasn’t like some jazz songs where the chords move in very disjunct ways. He never even noticed that it wasn’t squarely in a major key. His ear accepted it and I’m sure you’re would have too.

How did I know so quickly? That’s going to take a bunch more lessons to explain, but simply, I heard the E as the root chord and when it was followed by D, which is a flat 7th away from E, I knew it was mixolydian.

• When the root major chord is followed by another major chord built on the flat 7th scale degree, that’s mixolydian.
• (Hint: You can get to the b7th scale degree by going down two frets from any root.)

There are tips like this for each and every mode, and that’s why I’ll be doing a lot more posting on the subject. For now, what I want you to take away from this is that not every progression you encounter is going to fit into straight major or straight minor keys/scales. That’s precisely why I don’t think that modes are a big deal. They are not an advanced topic. Based on what you listen to, you may encounter modes before you encounter traditional major keys. It all depends on you and your tastes. I didn’t walk into modes for a long time. If I had been a Grateful Dead fan as a kid, I would have dealt with modes early as their music has a ton of mixolydian in it…

Leaps

There were several leaps in the last example. We’re going to have to get to those in time. Here’s what I got through very quickly:

1. I knew the chords in the progression the student wanted to play. You may not at first. You may need to ask for help. You may need to seek a teachers help to transcribe the chords, or get a TAB book to teach you.
2. The chords in that progression were perfectly in mixolydian. Not every progression is going to fit into modes and keys. Some of the most interesting songs break all the rules. It suited my example!
3. The student was able to identify the root chord correctly by ear. Maybe your ear isn’t there yet.
4. We quickly spelled out the E major scale as a point of comparison. You may not be comfortable with that yet.

So, we took a few leaps and based on your skill level, you may need to look at some of this in more detail. If you want some more basic music lessons, I’ve written a whole bunch of books you can find at amazon that may help you out.

I’m going to stop for tonight. I’m going to pick this up again by looking at a different way to dissect modes and how to play over chord progressions. The next post will talk about stacking them up and knocking them down. And it may take me a few days or weeks to get to it. I was excited to get this much out, so I traded my evening practice time to write this out.

Until then…

Marc

Out of all the concepts I teach, I enjoy teaching modes the most. It’s not just because I use modes on a daily basis. It’s not just because I feel that they’re important. It’s because they’re misunderstood and poorly taught. They are something that most players have heard of, yet few truly understand. This is going to be a series of posts because this is a big, deep topic and I have a lot I want to say. I’ve been thinking about this blog post for a few months now. This is going to be a very personal post, so I hope you enjoy it.

A bit of history

Modes are old—really old, in fact.  Rather than go into the detailed history of modes, you can check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_mode for a great lesson on their history.

What are they?

There are a few different approaches to teaching modes.  The most common approach is to think of modes as a displaced major scale.

Example:

• If you take the notes of the C major scale, and start on D, you’re playing the D dorian mode

There are seven different modes, one new mode coinciding with each note (or degree) of the major scale.  This approach gives you seven different modes

1. Ionian
2. Dorian
3. Phrygian
4. Lydian
5. Mixolydian
6. Aeolian
7. Locrian

The numbers above indicate which degree of the major scale you should start on for each respective mode.

Issues with this approach

I only teach this approach to college-bound students who need to understand it to fit into tradition curriculum.  For everyone else, I avoid this like the plague.  My biggest issue with this approach is that it’s a derivative approach from the major scale.  It’s also sonically hard to grasp. Just going to a piano and playing D dorian without any extra harmony will sound like a C major scale. Try it. Play all white keys on a piano and start and end on D. A second later, play the C. See how it setteles into C? That’s because the major scale is so well engrained into our western society. Most students who try modes can’t get the sound of the parent major scale out of their heads. There are ways around this. And we’ll look into that in a later post. Back to the derivative approaches issues. With that system, to get to any individual mode, you have to think back to the individual parent scale and then count up.  It’s not so bad when you’re asked what the 3rd mode of C is, but it makes it a bit more difficult when you need to know what a D lydian scale is. Now you have to figure out which parent scale D is the 4th note of (A) and use that key signature for the scale tones. Yuck. It’s not fast. It’s not fluid. You have to know what mode is what number, and you have to know your key signatures by heart.  For many students, modes are tied to parent major scales. In reality, modes stand on their own. They are their own keys.I have proof.

Proof

Everyone knows at least one mode. The minor scale is a mode. Yup. Let’s break it down simply.

• The notes of the A natural minor scale are A B C D E F G A

Most students learn major and minor scales as part of their studies. Some teachers will teach the concept of relative keys while others will simply teach minor scales as their own thing, which makes sense because so much classical literature is either in major or minor keys. Major and minor sound very different. You’d never mistakenly identify major for minor and vice versa. When you play an A minor scale on the guitar you’re probably not thinking that you’re playing a displaced C major scale are you? It looks different. It sounds different. Let’s look at the scale again.

• The notes of the A natural minor scale are A B C D E F G A
• The notes of the C major scale are C D E F G A B C

As you can see, they share the same notes. The A natural minor scale starts on C’s 6th note. This makes it the 6th mode of C major; the mode is A aeolian. But you don’t think about it that way, do you? Just like identical twins may come from the same DNA, they can be quite different people.  Modes are the same way.  They’re different.

If they sound different, they are different, regardless of how similar they are on paper.

A better way

My biggest issue with the derivative approach is that it implies that the major scale is the model and that all other modes are derived from it. For many, there is a false understanding that major and minor are they only two keys music can be in. I want to throw out the old thinking and start a novel approach: I’m going to listen to the modes.

Here’s how I began this process when I was 17.  I knew from taking the National Guitar Workshops summer course that the dorian mode was the second mode of the major scale. As illiterate as I was back then, I could determine that D dorian had the following notes:

• D E F G A B C D

When I played it on the piano and the guitar, it didn’t sound anything like C major to me. It sounded like a minor scale. It wasn’t exactly like the minor scale I knew at the time, but it sounded close enough that I was able to associate it. It was almost like the minor scale was green and dorian was hunter green. I sat down with a piece of paper and very, very slowly worked out what the D minor scale was. Something really important had happened and a huge lightbulb went off. Here’s what I found out.

• The notes of the D dorian scale were D E F G A B C D
• The notes of the D natural minor scale were  D E F G A Bb C D

No wonder they sounded similar. They were 6/7ths the same.  The only change was the B vs the Bb.

Back to the chord

Fairly perplexed by this new discovery, I quickly grabbed the Tascam 4-track (I’m dating myself) and recorded a few minutes of an open D minor chord. I was going to use this to improvise over. I went ahead and played for a few minutes and it really started to sink in. Minor and dorian both fit the D minor chord perfectly. They had interesting qualities that were very different. They both worked. I went back to my pad and pencil to figure out what was up. With some effort, I named the notes in the D minor chord as D F A. I had really hit something now. Both the dorian and natural minor scale contained the notes of the D minor chord. Let’s see:

• The notes of the D dorian scale were D E F G A B C D
• The notes of the D natural minor scale were  D E F G A Bb C D

You can see the notes of the D minor chord bolded for clarity. I remember very clearly making the following mental analogy (or something very close to it):

Chord tones are to improvising as foundations are to houses.

Since both scales gave me the basic notes of the chords (the frame of the house), the notes that filled in the chord tones (the 2nd, 4th and 6th) were the different choices in window shades, or different exterior treatments. I found that I could play almost anything I wanted to for the non-chord tones as long as I kept the chord tones intact. This was a huge moment for me. Despite this, I wouldn’t really get to do anything with modes for years to come. More on that later. What I had done was make a mental connection, and that really excited me. In the end, I still thought that natural minor sounded better to me, but that was purely opinion. I didn’t do much with this information, sadly.

Relationships

With this revelation behind me, I set forth to learn the rest of the modes and see if they held the same mystery. I started off on paper, spelled them out. I went to the piano to hear them. I recorded some chords to play over. Within a few days, I had my answer.

Modes are different flavors of major and minor scales, usually with only one note different. The different note was never a chord tone.

Here’s what the list looked like:

• Ionian was the proper modal name for the major scale, so there was nothing to do
• Dorian was a minor-type scale
• Phrygian was a minor-type scale
• Lydian was a major-type scale
• Mixolydian was a major-type scale
• Aeolian was the proper modal name for the natural minor scale, so there was nothing to do
• Locrian was a minor-type scale, but it cracked the mold. It was the only scale that had two different notes

I had figured out a lot of stuff on my own, but I still had no idea what to do with this information. At the time, I was 17 and my world revolved around Yngwie Malmsteen and Dream Theater. Yngwie was almost exclusively playing minor and harmonic minor scales.  Dream Theater was a bit harder to figure out as their music is quite complex, but I knew that my major and minor scales fit over the vast majority of their music.

How I practiced

I wish I could say that I did all the right things as a student. I took very limited lessons, and I wish I could tell you that I listened to my teachers. I was a pretty poor student. I wanted to do what I wanted to do. I practiced exclusively by playing along with records. I learned solos by ear and I improvised along with the songs. I loved doing that. I taught myself a ton. I did it for 8-10 hours a day.  When it came to modes, no matter what I did, I couldn’t find a great place to use modes because my ears were so trained to hear major and natural minor that the modes just didn’t seem right. The music I was playing over didn’t seem to support my newfound knowledge. Or so I thought.

Shapes are a funny thing

I have to confess something. When I was 17, I had a single goal. I wanted to play the guitar really fast. My nickname at the National Guitar Workshop was Shred. I didn’t really pay too much attention to detail or nuance. Note names flew by like gnats. I wanted to burn. And burn I did. When I played over Dream Theater, I could still use my trusty major and minor scale shapes. I didn’t think I was using modes at all. See, I wasn’t really thinking about the derivative approach because when it was taught to me, it seemed silly and useless. I played shapes. I played my old shapes and I played em fast. Scales were long horizontal strings of notes. I didn’t think about the start of end of the scales because to me, there wasn’t a start or an end.

Backup

Back in time. Remember how I had learned to play the D dorian scale on the guitar? When I learned that, I learned a vertical scale shape (which was something I didn’t really use much of at the time). I didn’t derive it from C major. I made a new shape. When I switched back and forth from D dorian to D minor, the shapes looked different. The sounded different. They were different. Keep this in mind as I progress.

Satch

Remember how I played along to CDs a lot? I was playing along to Joe Satriani’s Flying in a Blue Dream. I learned 90% of the song my senior year of high school. I found it easy to learn because I could use the scale shapes that I knew so well My patterns helped me learn the song pretty easily. The song sounded bright and happy, so I assumed it was major. I let my fingers dance a bit to find the right notes and away I went. All the difficult scale runs fell right into the finger patterns I knew so well.

Then it happened. Guitar World showed up. It has a transcription of Flying in a Blue Dream. It had some great notes about the song in a preface to the transcription. To my shock and horror the first line of the preface was akin to “Flying in a Blue Dream is a a perfect example of the lydian mode as the basis for an instrumental composition.”

I couldn’t believe it. So I called up my high school music teacher, Mr. Mooney and talked to him. I couldn’t understand how I could play my major scale patterns over this song, yet the transcriber called it lydian. I was sure the magazine was wrong. Mr. Mooney asked me to bring both the guitar and the CD to school.

Schooled

I head into school with my gear and play the song for him. I don’t know if he liked the music very much, but he was able to say within a few seconds that it was definitely modal, definitely lydian, and definitely not major.  He then asked me to play along. After a few minutes he stopped me and asked me to very slowly play my scale shapes for him. As he walked to the piano, he played a G major scale in one hand and a G major scale in the other. He asked me if that sounded right for the song. I said no, because while the notes sounded OK, the chord didn’t fit. Then he did it. I played the same G major scale in one hand and played a C major chord in the left hand. “That’s the right chord,” I said. “You’re playing lydian, Marc,” he said. “You lie,” I shouted (I didn’t but I just had to throw that in. Turns out that the song was in C Lydian. Turns out that C lydian and G major have the exact same notes. Turns out that if you play a scale shape fast enough and you never really stop on any note long enough to be heard as a root, G major sounds just like C lydian. I was playing G major scale shapes and patterns over a C lydian song and never knew it. I had been paying modes since the beginning. I just never knew it. If I knew more about my scales, I would have seen the issue. Flying in a Blue Dream is in C Lydian. That means that the note C is the strongest note. Everything revolves around that note. If I had known my fingerboard, I would have understood that C was the root of my scale. But I didn’t. I could barely play a G major scale. I assumed I was playing a major scale. I didn’t think to slow down enough and name it properly.

Totally confused

Now I was upset. I was wrong about something pretty important. This was a crushing blow to my ego. I had to go back and dissect all of the songs I knew. How many modes had I whizzed by? Problem was, I couldn’t really find any other examples.  Perplexed, I went back to Mr. Mooney and bemoaned my predicament. He assured me that I was definitely playing modes, I just lacked the music theory knowledge, fingerboard knowledge and the aural acuity to discern them. Remember how I said that I wasn’t able to use modes for years? This is one of the reasons. I wasn’t ready for them yet.

Academic only

As my first year of college passed, I was fully entrenched in classical guitar studies and music theory classes. I was able to understand modes on a deeper level. I was finally starting to understand my fingerboard better, but I wasn’t improvising for credit, I was learning pieces. Most of the pieces were in major and minor keys, so my current knowledge got me pretty far. Modes were something I understood academically, but still had no real use for. I had even found a few more examples of modes in music I liked, but I still didn’t seek out those sounds. Major and Minor and pentatonic seemed to work for my music and that’s all I played.

Break

I’m going to stop for now because it’s midnight and I’m tired.  I wanted to give a lot of history about my process. One of the challenges about teaching is knowing what order to present things in. Even though I had the mental chops to understand modes, until my ears and level were ready for them, modes were an academic exercise. I had to wait until the music I was making needed modes. Remember that word: need. The next article is about wanting vs needing modes. I’ll also chronicle how I finally learned to use modes and how it changed my playing. Next up, we’ll explore how I accidentally became a jazz player and how I can help you think about modes in a new way.