Comment by protoman3000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by protoman3000 | Hacker News Reader

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> Modes are essentially left-rotations of a scale.

While true, I find this interpretation harmful to the understanding of modes. It didn't provide me with any insight and instead it seemed irregular to the other theoretical constructs we have and thus deterred and misled me in the beginning.

To me, it all clicked when I took all the modes, except Lydian, and constructed them by putting down the augmentations to the major scale in a circle-of-fifths sorted way:

Mixolydian: b7, Dorian: b7 b3, Aeolian: b7 b3 b6, ...

You can see that the modes appear walking left on the circle of fifths or walking along fourths (or going "darker", as some prefer to say). Try this out when starting at e.g. C and you see the pattern immediately.

Then take Lydian: #4

That's going right on the circle of fifths or going in fifths going "brighter".

Also, tangential comment: My music and my life has changed profoundly when I found out how to use the Lydian mode. I can't explain it, but it is just exciting.

One way to make that ordering work with Lydian is to start with Lydian and flatten one note each time. So say we start in C. C lydian, flatten the F# we have C Ionian, flatten the b we have C mixolydian, flatten the e we have C dorian, flatten the A we have C aeolian, flatten the d we have C phrygian, flatten the g we have C locrian

Now we flatten the C (after all this is the next note in the cycle of fifths) and we have.... B lydian. And the whole thing starts again.

In this way you can understand how all the modes and keys relate. You can do a similar thing with the other 3 similar modes of limited transposition in this order (melodic minor, harmonic minor and harmonic major).

Have fun.

What made it click for me analyzing music, in particular rock songs like 'Gloria.' That song very strongly identifies E major as the tonic, but the D and A chords are not in E, they are diatonic to A major. To say it is in A major would mean the song's tonic would be A, but since it is E major it is more correct to say the song is in E Mixolydian.

Adam Neely recently did a great analysis of 'Hey Joe' that goes pretty deep into this stuff https://youtu.be/DVvmALPu5TU

Oddly, for me it was the opposite!

I used to be confused on why modes required modifying certain notes from a major scale until I tried deriving them in the way shown in the article.

Of course, once you understand that, the way you go about memorizing and practicing is probably easier the way you described; that is, deriving modes in any given key by modifying notes of the major scale using the circle of fifths.

> modes required modifying certain notes from a major scale

But why though? If you're improvising on a dominant (e.g. a G7 in the key of C Major) with a G Mixolydian scale, you're actually not playing a Mixolydian sound, but Ionian, since your tonal center is C Ionian. It is true, it is indeed a G Mixolydian scale and it is using the tonal contents of our key C Ionian. But our frame is Ionian, so what is the purpose of adding Mixolydian other than ease of construction of the scale?

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