[__tsidewinder__]

sorry, but this honestly sounds like you guys are giving out opinions not facts.

"But even that's unnecessary - he could just take any 'out of scale' note he wanted from the chromatic scale, without thinking in terms of modes at all."

Sure, but then again, we could just play any ol' note we please and hope it sounds good, couldn't we?

I asked:
"Western music uses just the two modes (Ionian and Aeolian) because they make the "best" chord progressions."
Monk said:
"no"

but fretsource said
"it was found that most of the modes were pretty useless at supplying the notes that could produce good chord progressions, i.e., progressions that could establish a strong tonal centre, as Monk noted above.

The Ionian mode, and with a little 'tweaking', the Aeolian mode, emerged as the only ones that could do the job. They became (and still are) known as the fully transposable "Major and Minor modes", and the old modes were relegated to a position of historical curiosity."

so I don't know if you guys are making stuff up, don't fully understand yourselves, make lots of typos, or just disagree with each other.


Next, we have this issue :

"To me that's complicating things for no reason and it doesn't add contrast or variety."

so they "complicate things" and "don't add variety". You are saying they are useless, for modern improvisation.

Except that I've heard that various guitar greats like steve vai and joe satriani use modal scales a lot in their improvisation. They are also excellent music theorists.

anyone have a link that explains modes clearly? I'd fed up with trying to sort through various viewpoints while trying to learn something.