Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Kirk Lorange
Modes tend to take care of themselves if you're playing the kind of music we usually listen to ...
|
One of the guitar-related "breakthroughs" I've had was in a thread over at Kirk's
Planetalk forum, where we were discussing playing chord tones. It suddenly dawned on me, and Kirk confirmed, that when the underlying chord changes and you play new notes based on that chord, you are actually playing a mode - or at least a partial mode.
For example, let's say you have a I - ii - V progression. The I chord is your major chord, and it sets the key. You can build a solo around the tones within that chord triad, plus other related notes, and you're essentially using the major (Ionian) scale.
Now the music switches to the ii chord. Do the same thing with your solo - build it around the notes within the ii chord, which is still in the same key as the I chord. And guess what - you're now in Dorian mode. And the best part is, you didn't have to think about it. You just followed the music. As Kirk said above, the modes take care of themselves.
What happens when the music goes to the V chord? Follow the chord tones ... and you're playing in Mixolydian mode, based on the fifth degree of the major scale.
You can choose to use only the chord tones, and thus be playing partial modes, or you can use the full "chord scales" or modes in the same manner. Why does this work? Because the modes within a given key have the same notes - and those come from the major (Ionian) scale. So, if you know the key you are in, and you know the major scale inside out, then let your tonic (root note) follow the underlying chord and the modes take care of themselves.
And now that I've gotten that in my head, I hope to never have to think about modes again.
Hope that's helpful to you.