Scale Modes are Weirder Than I Thought

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[claytonthedavis]

I think what gets lost in teaching music theory—and a lot of people who should know better are guilty of this, from neighborhood piano teachers to contest judges to MIDI chord pack bros—is that theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. Scales and harmonizing existed before a bunch of university boffins gave them fancy Greek names, and the fact that some note combinations make harmonies that people like is a weird mix of acoustic physics and cultural upbringing. You don’t need to know any of it to make music, but it can save you a lot of time if you do. So music theory is bullshit, but it’s bullshit that *works.*

[JTMusicbox]

The fox face was oddly hypnotic and I had no choice but to watch this straight through in one sitting, though I would have anyway because modal theory is freaking awesome!
Yeah definitely learned some things but still loved hearing the parts I already knew. Decades ago I knew nothing and was writing a song I thought was only in C major but was informed it was actually A minor and I thought, “neat! Why not try writing with the same notes but move the root to different notes.” Then I was writing in all the modes but only much later in a jazz history class in college learned that church modes are a thing. Mind blown again. This video explained the names and various other facts that are blowing my mind yet again. Thank you!

[matthewdavis]

I’ve watched hundreds of videos on modes and this was by far the most fun

[bodhibeats]

Great stuff Jeremy! One little thing to add: you mentioned that A Minor is the “relative minor” to C Major. In that same way, this “you can play all the modes with just the white keys” means that F Lydian is the “relative lydian” to C Major. We don’t seem to use names like “relative dorian” or “relative phrygian” very often, but they work just the same as “relative minor.” 😁

And a little tip for writing with modes: most of the modes have just one note different from a major or minor scale. This is the note that gives each mode its unique character. Jeremy mentions that in Dorian you get a major subdominant (IV) chord. That happens because the characteristic note of Dorian is the sixth degree (which is sharp compared to natural minor), and that six degree is in the subdominant chord. When writing in modes, it’s usually useful to emphasize the characteristic note of the mode by using it in the harmony. The characteristic notes of each mode, when compared to major or natural minor, are:

Dorian (minor): raised 6th
Phrygian (minor): lowered 2nd
Lydian (major): raised 4th
Mixolydian (major) lowered 7th

(Let’s not talk about Locrian!)

Great video Jeremy!

[rhapsodyaria]

If you want examples of every single mode, there's an album by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard called "Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms, And Lava" (see if you can notice the gimmick in the title)! Each song is written in a consecutive mode. So the first is in Ionian, then Dorian, and so on! Very good songs and a wonderful implementation of this bit of music theory!
One CW though: The song Hell's Itch contains descriptions of self-harm.

[ToyKeeper]

I wrote a little midi daemon which reads two keyboards, one "hint track" for key/scale/chord info and the other for performance info, and merges them into a single output stream. Tap 2 or more notes at the same time on the "hint" keyboard to set a new key, scale, or chord (or tap 1 note to transpose)... and then the white notes on the performance keyboard get automatically remapped to fit. This makes improvisation really easy, even for songs with complex key changes and stuff, because the hint track can be sequenced to keep the performance track always in tune. The program also shows the current status for both on a screen, like the name (if any) and tonic for the current scale, and the name (if any) for what is currently being played. So I had to build a big table of nearly every possible combination of notes, find out which ones have names, and make up labels for the others. Someday I really should clean it up and put it on github or something.

[KitCabaret]

Hot tip for anyone thinking about playing with modes: they make key changes easy and smooth as butter! By keeping the scale the same but temporarily changing the root note, you can inject certain feelings into a song, like an adventure without ever leaving home. Or, if you're modulating to a scale that's further away, you can borrow chords from the different modes of your current scale to ease the transition. It's really something you get a feel for the more you play around with it, give it a try and see what you come up with!

(I actually found this out by accident - I needed a filler track for an album, so decided to take one of my old compositions and move it around to different modes. But I discovered by playing it in F Dorian, I was able to PERFECTLY transition into the next song in E flat Major, since you know, both scales are all the same notes!)

[aravartanian]

It gets even more perplexing when they talk about it in jazz. They're like: oh yeah, play the mixolydian with a dominant 7th. Play the dorian with the minor 7th. And as a pianist you are thinking .... you mean I just keep playing the same major scale?

[JazzyFizzleDrummers]

Cuppla things.
The modes have a pretty deep relationship to counterpoint. If you're new to studying functional harmony i reccomend stepping back a bit and digging deeper into counterpoint. A lot of the "weirdness" starts making a lot more sense.

Also, and this isnt necessarily a callout because it's an issue in music theory, but we collectively need to formalize some scale names and genre names that don't utilize slurs for romani people.

[richardrodseth]

Fun presentation. Couple of things:
1) I think it's fine to just think of a mode as a rotation of a "parent scale". That Phrygian Dominant you like is the 5th mode of Harmonic Minor (which, as you point out, has a minor 3rd in it).
2) As you showed, most of us learn the major scale (Ionian) pattern by the intervals *between* the notes,   i.e. W-W-H-W-W-W-H, but ultimately I think it's good to learn the names of intervals (from a given root/tonic), so that you can understand that natural minor is characterized by a minor 6th and minor 7th (m6, m7) while Dorian minor has a major 6th and minor 7th (M6, m7). Harmonic minor has a minor 6th and a major 7th (m6, M7). Etc. I think that's easier than trying to memorize that Dorian is W-H-W-W-W-H-W
3) On the other hand, that last sentence does show that Dorian is a palindrome.:)
4) The so-called Greek modes can be arranged from light to dark in the following order: Lydian, Ionian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Aeolian, Phrygian, Locrian. I remember this as LIMDAPL. Starting with Lydian, you lower, in order, 4-7-3-6-2-5-1. (ie the 4th, then the 7th etc). The cool thing is when you reach the darkest (Locrian) and lower the 1 (root/tonic) you get Lydian a step lower, i.e. you can start the cycle all over again. 
Hope all that made sense.

[GeorgeL]

I do it like
Desert level scale: phrygian dominant
Arabian vampire tower scale: harmonic minor
Water level: ionian
Level that requires a flashlight cause it's really dark: locrian
Mushroom forest: mixolydian
Tavern music: Dorian

Yup... Music theory...

[miniman]

I don’t know if it’s been mentioned already, but when I was studying this in school, we discussed how the thing about disliking the augmented second in the harmonic minor scale at least partially had to do with vocalists. They believed that it would be difficult for vocalists to sing that interval in tune, so many of those especially old conventions exist around performability on their specific instruments. A lot of things in music are holdovers from practicality of how things used to be, and that still exists even in the production world today, which is always fun for me to discover

[cybernet]

I don't know what I love more about this video - the fact that Jeremy is, I think, the person I find most helpful at learning a topic from; or the fact that he's just fully leaned into his furryness now with the talking fox <3

[whatevil]

You should check out the album Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. It has one song in each mode and also it just slaps generally.

[truhhimself]

i'm really surprised that you have missed that when you've been in music for so long. it's probably the first thing beyond minor and major i learned when playing guitar as a kid.
when making music, i do find western theory pretty limiting nowadays. i lifted my favourite scale from indian classical music (and have yet to find anyone else making use of it in the west).

[theophilos]

I like what the great Johann Joseph Fux said in his 279-page tome on ‘Counterpoint’ called ‘Gradus Ad Parnassum’ (1725) :

Aloysius : When it comes to the contradictory & confusing writings on the subject of Ancient Greek Modes, my very dear Joseph, all I can say about them is that the whole subject is one Giant Clusterfuck—with hardly any ancient theorist agreeing on much common ground at all’ (de Modis from Gradvs ad Parnassvm p. 221-228)

So if we dig back into the writings of Pythagoras, Eratokles, Adrastos, Plato, Aristotle, Aristoxenos of Tarentum, Philodemos of Gedara, Nichomachus, Porphyrios of Tyre, Aristides Quintillianus, Plutarchos, Boethius, Claudius Ptolomaeos and later theorists such as Zarlino in the 1570s—we can see exactly what Fux was talking about — and some Ancient Greek theorists like Aristoxenos spilled a lot of ink vilifying earlier theorists (‘we say this interval is dissonant but the uneducated writers like Lassos or Epigonos or Adrastos not surprisingly have wasted a lot of pen and ink on a lot of silly nonsense…’)

Making the whole subject even more cludgy is the fact that ancient Greek musical theorists didn’t address ‘diatonic’ or even ‘chromatic’ scales except in passing—and spent all their time on weird ‘enharmonic scales’ which were not related at all to the modern piano keyboard with ‘even temperament’ where each semitone (half-tone, say between C and C#) to-day contains 100 Pythagorean ‘cents’ evenly divided over 88 keys — whereas Pythagorean tuning (based more closely on mathematical ratios such as 1:1, 2:1. 3:2, 4:3, 5:4, 6:5 etc.) had 1/4 tones and half-tones not evenly distributed — limiting the possibilities of ‘sweet harmony’ —

By the year say 1650 the so-called tuning into an ‘even-temperament system’ was more of an issue with fixed keyboard instruments — with stringed instruments like the violin or violoncello a simple ‘lean’ of fingering the string can flatten or sharpen any tone at will — but with an harpsichord a b-flat is stuck as a b-flat and sounds the same as an A#—which is not the case in music written before the year 1680…

Even temperament allows all 24 keys to be played without having to ‘well-temper’ the fifths & thirds so is very handy but the ancient Greeks (and theorists up to the year 1700) didn’t have that luxury !! LoL

[SyncrisisVideos]

I think myxolydian with a flat 6 sounds really nice, for the same reason as why you like Dorian, but inverse. Myxolidian flat 6 is like inverted Dorian, with a Major root surrounded by minor chords. This can be useful to have a hopeful resolution on the home key.

[poelogan]

i made a video about how to think about modes easier! they make sense if you simplify them into “just playing the scale degree” instead of “playing x mode”

[ampersand]

you being a flute player makes so much sense. Big flautist vibes from this channel.

[codeWormCom]

Awesome! Particularly helpful to hear all the modes in C next to each other at the end. Next do the chords that are diatonic to the scale, and how you can use them in composition!