Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner - Non Classical So modes are the major scale starting from different notes?

I hope one of those comments is mine. Because I'm about to go deep. Y'all that are experienced jazz players can slap me around and correct me afterwards--this is basically my own thinking on the subject based on personal exploration.


What I mean by this comment is that I have been experimenting with modes as an avenue to improvisation. It is probably an inferior option to using chords--if you had to choose one, and you don't.

Imagine you are sitting at a keyboard. You think 'let's mess around in the key of C major'. You can bring your entire bag of tricks with you, play some I-IV-V, or whatever chords and patterns you like.

Cool.

But you think 'you know what, I want to try something different. Let's make this thing go back and forth between what I'm doing and a more Phyrgian-sounding melody line.'

Well, you've been playing in Phyrgian all along...so good job! Except not really, because the point of the modes is really that they emphasize the folk-melodic feel of the melody line. So in that sense, maybe the best way to think about modes is in terms of melodic expression. It bleeds into harmony (chord pattern and choice) as well, but it is underpinned by melodic expression.

So even though you've been playing Phyrgian all along (and all of the modes), you haven't been playing melodies that build tension away from the root note of that mode.

In this case, it would be E, since the E-Phrygian mode begins with E, uses all the white keys, and ends on E. So the same exact notes as C-major, but the basis and character of the melody is different.

So we are talking about a pretty big shift when we move from C-Ionian to E-Phrygian. But at the same time, since all the same notes are used, it could be easily missed. So this is left to the improviser on how much to bring out this shift. On the one hand, it could be nothing more than using the iii chord a bit and laying a melodic line over the iii, but staying firmly in C-major overall and just being mindful that this little exploration of the iii could be most effective with melodic phrases that use E as a root. Or, if it's more of a 'this train is leaving' departure, you could say to yourself 'we are going into E-Phrygian territory' with its own rules and customs. You may never come back, so bring your valuables. You are leaving the key of C and going to the key of E...Phrygian.

The first thing you recognize is that the chords are all the same as C-major, that is, you have C-maj, D-min, E-min, F-maj, G-maj, A-min, B-dim. Using notation from the original key of C, these would have been (in C) I ii iii IV V vi vii°

In E-Phrygian, they would become, using the same chords from C-maj: iii IV V vi vii° I ii

But we left C-maj and are now in a new key (sorta), so let's base these off of the root E. Then we would get this chord pattern: i II III iv v° VI vii. Which is kinda messed up if you ask me. But, you tell yourself, 'when in Rome'...

You find some outlets for your musical ideas using these new chords (which are all the exact same chords as from C-maj, but you no longer consider C to be the tonic). The key thing is the melody must emphasize the Phrygian character, otherwise it could slip back home over the border into C-maj.

You get to thinking. What if we said heck with it, let's buy a house in the key of E (major)?

Well, there's an issue with your visa: the key of E has the notes E, F#, G#, A, B, C#, D#. E-Phrygian has all the white key notes. So the language has some stuff in common, but not a lot. Oof. We could do it, but it would be a radical change, and maybe we aren't ready for that.

How about instead of a house, an apartment? Let's look at E-Dorian. Hm. E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D. This is way more affordable than E-maj, only two new notes. So you try it out, being careful to introduce F# and C# in the right way. If we look at the chords of E-Dorian, we have: i ii III IV v vi° VII. There's some overlap--we get to keep E-min, G-maj, and ... that's it. We will lean heavily on those two as we introduce A-maj and D-maj. The truth is, just after we put a 6-month lease on this apartment in E-Dorian, we see that the next country over is D-Major, and it looks great. We already know that's where we want to live. So we'll just enjoy our stay in E-Dorian for a little while. Try the new food (this B-minor chord is pretty tasty).

Of course, the whole time, be mindful of emphasizing the Dorian quality with use of E as the tonic in the melody. Otherwise it might be mistaken as D-major.

Yeah, so then after the lease is up, we go into D-major, and there is an opportunity for strong resolution in that modulation back to Ionian.

In my comment I went a bit further, but hopefully this is a start!

I understand I said nothing of 7ths, the foundation of jazz, of which my knowledge is primitive, but I hope this is at least a worthwhile observation on modes.

Practicing maj7 chords and their inversions I've noticed that there are different modes that relate to each inversion. For example the 3rd inversion of cmaj7 goes b-c-d-e. Then if i play the whole scale that fits the chord i can choose between locrian and phrigian (from b to b). Is this correct or am i misunderstanding something?

The third inversion of C maj 7 has the notes (in ascending order) B C E G.
There are several different scales you may choose to play over that combination of notes but I don’t think you are really doing yourself any favours thinking about ‘locrian mode from the B’, because that is just a C major scale, which, unsurprisingly, works perfectly well most times you play on a C major 7th chord, whether it is in inversion or not.
B phrygian is the 3rd mode of G major scale, but again you are just making it more complicated than it needs to be. If you are improvising with G major on a C maj 7 chord that is the lydian - or C major scale with a raised 4th.
If you are hanging out on these chords for a long period of time it could beneficial to think of the modes in the way you are, but there aren’t many tunes that hang out on Cmaj7/B for any length of time, so you don't need to worry about relabelling each scale for each inversion.

Thanks for the explanation and for pointing my mistake about the notes in the chord, I'm more used to the do re mi nomenclature.

As far as I understand:
When we are talking about jazz(and maybe some other types of non-classical music), the harmonic context is what determine, for example:
If you play the C major scale over the Dmin7 chord, you are playing the Dorian mode.
If you play the C major scale over the G7 chord, you are playing the Mixolydian mode.
And so on.

When we are talking about modalic music, there are some chord progressions, that considered to be modalic chord progressions, that belong to some specific mode.

I hope this was helpful.

Need to clarify: "If you play pitches of C major scale over the Dmin7 chord, you are playing the D Dorian mode.
If you play pitches of C major scale over the G7 chord, you are playing the G Mixolydian mode. "
The internal gravity of the pitches in the C major scale pulls in C; the internal gravity of the pitches in G mixolydian and G7 pulls in G.

I agree.
And you shouldn't really spend too much time on modes. Learn them, yes, but ultimately they fail in helping you improvising in a bebop context. They are essential when you build vocings according to the correct chordscale relationship. IE: F ionic for a Fmajor7 chord, but in my experience they are of little help when it comes to right hand improvisation.

If you are soloing on a tune like ‘so what’ or ‘bolivia’ it is going to easiest to describe those primary scale choices as modes (dorian and mixolydian resectively). If someone doesn’t know those terms then you have to get into the ‘play C major scale but on a Dm/G7 chord’ kind of discussion, which is just a more confusing and round about way of describing the same notes.
Sure if you just want to play pure bebop then you don’t need to know what a phrigian mode is but in order to understand and play more modern music (jazz from the 60s! for example) it is important to be able to describe these tonalities. Of course we can go too far (and describing each chord inversion as having its own mode is an example of that imo) but it seems to me that many peoples objection to using the modes as scale choices is just that they can’t be bothered to learn the greek terms. i can understand that in the sense that ‘dorian mode’ as used in jazz doesn’t really have anything to do with pre-baroque music or ancient Greece, but you still have to describe those note choices in some way and the modal names are the easiest I think, at least for modes of the major scale.

Maybe the easiest way to describe them yes, but to me, not the best way. I still think of chord tones if Im stuck on a chord, esoteric or not, for along time. Ie "this is the 4th, it resolves to the third or 5th" Thus relating every chromatic pitch in the same matter and resolving them accordingly. At the same time I'm well aware of what the underlying chord scale is cause I learned that long ago, but if Im only thinking in those terms it ends up sounding bland and uninteresting.
This is just my personal experience of course. I know artist like Scofield and Keith Jarrett thinks a lot in scales and they are among my favourite artists.