 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel, welcome back if you're a subscriber, if you're not one, do check out this video, if you like the video please consider subscribing. So let's just demystify it in this tutorial where I'm going to give you two perspectives of using a mode. So sometimes the perspective of modes which is given in the textbook is a perspective which is very either too complex or something you have to mug up before you can actually use and then by the time you actually use it it's very difficult to visualize because you haven't mugged it up well and most of the things which happen in music you have to use it only then you will understand it and get it into your fingers so to speak. You're not going to get it just by reading it out of a book or staring at a book. So the first perspective of modes which I'd like to convey is look at modes just like another scale. So you have a major scale, you have a minor scale so you have a mode which is just given a name like Dorian, Phrygian, Mixolydian, you have Mixolydian flat 6 which is a mode from the melodic minor, you have Lydian dominant and what not. So why not just look at these modes as scales. For instance if I take the key of F, now when I say the key of F, when I'm looking at it modally the word key just means key so it's F. So with respect to F I can form a bunch of scales using the intervals of those other notes with respect to the F. For example I could have a scale with a major second or I could have a scale with a minor second you see the difference in emotion. So a mode is just a combination of all these things. So you have a major second, it's a huge change. Similarly major third, minor third, very, very different, very contrasting. Perfect fourth, sharp four or you could even call it a diminished five. See we call it a sharp four or an augmented four when you have a perfect fifth but when you've kind of destroyed the fifth or where the fifth becomes a flattened version then we call it a diminished fifth which kind of gives you that chaos but in the case of some scales it could also have a very dreamy quality which is the Lydian sharp four versus it could also be a diminished five. When you have a perfect fifth you could have a sharp five which is an augmented five. You could have a major sixth or a minor sixth you could have a major seventh or a flat seventh so this is how you could actually look at a mode or a scale. So in this argument or this perspective of a mode I'm just saying let's just treat a mode as a scale and use it however which way we want. We are in the key of F that is way more important in our songwriting than to say I'm in a specific scale of F like F major or F minor. It's sometimes enough to say that I'm in the key of F and now I will say okay which scale do I want to play or which mode or which Raga if you are into Raga's should I play with respect to F so from that perspective you can form all your seven major modes as it's called you can have F major and then you could build forward so now what is a major scale with a flat seven we call that as Mixolydian which I quite like and you get the vibe of it as long as you have the root the perspective is the root so major mixo now I agree that we all reference everything with the major scale so the mixolydian you could just remember it as a major scale with a flat in seventh now you have the Lydian which is the major scale with a raised four or a sharpened four or an augmented fourth you want to highlight that that's another scale called the Lydian scale now you have some of the minor modes so I've talked about major mixolydian and Lydian major is also called as Ionian in the modal literature so if you look at the minor modes I guess the most common one is the minor scale or the natural minor which will be the Aeolian or the natural minor which is a major scale which is with a flat in third or a minor third this is not a flat this is a perfect fourth flat six flat seven very desolate very sad but if you now raise the sixth or if you make it major becomes very brave it's like you're overcoming all odds too that's your Dorian with the raise six and then what else you have the Phrygian which is a very exotic sound due to that flat two Phrygian and then you have your Locrian which is not so much used it's a diminished mode because it goes on the diminished chord and so you play everything's flat basically flat two flat three flat five or the tritone goes well with the minor seven flat five chord which is this one minor seventh flat five so we won't talk so much about this of each mode I just want to show you the perspective so you have seven major modes as they call them but see you can do other things if you know your modes of the melodic minor well the melodic minor is one once you know the melodic minor or even if you don't know the melodic minor and just know what modes came from there you'll realize that you may like a few for example the Mixolydian flat six which is that came from that very much came from the melodic minor and the question is do you even need to know which melodic minor it came from to start composing or to make sense out of the scale I I don't think so you you just have to use this forget the fact that there was major or melodic minor or anything it's the mix of flat six scale which if you see in my music I use this a lot I really like that you also have something called as Lydian dominant scale so Lydian dominant which is dominant seventh so now that you've figured out your options modes are just a bunch of scales what you could then do is figure out how you can harmonize them how you can kind of create certain chord movements which make it very specific or characteristic of that particular mode so if you're trying to look at Mixolydian a very common thing would be to do a seven flat four major and come down to the major if you're doing Dorian you can do that one minor four major or if you're doing a natural minor you could play the chords from the natural minor so in the charts which we have prepared in the booklet which you're going to get on our patreon you I have mapped out all the available chords for every possible mode or at least the most number of modes or scales which you will come across so when you're looking at modes as a scale you need to understand in conclusion just to summarize this perspective of looking at modes you need to look at a very strong root you need to look at the unique intervals Dorian flat three flat six Phrygian flat two you need to look at those important intervals which make it click then you have to look at cadences which make it very characteristic steady root and then develop your world remember your scale degrees and also map out the available chords which is there in the chart waiting for you on our patreon so moving on to the second perspective of using modes which is the standard textbook perspective let's get cracking with that so the second perspective of using modes will just take the traditional textbook approach and we just discuss that so if you take a key you take a key ff and keep all the modes with by retaining the key signature so there's a difference between the key signature and the key the key is just the key while the key signature is how many sharps of flats the scale has which is generally biased towards the major or the natural minor in terms of how we write it in sheet music so the key signature of f major or the key of f major or its relative minor d minor is one flat namely b flat at one flat there now how it works here is you have different modes formed automatically as you change your roots so if it's f or f major and i play the mode or the scale it has a certain vibe it has the f vibe f major vibe but now if i take my finger and play the very next scale degree in my base which is g i will get the same f major notes starting on g the vibe is very different isn't it and we know from theory that the second mode is the dorian mode so if you go the second degree you're going to get dorian which is the same way i told you earlier you flat the three you flat the six you're going to get dorian even if you never knew the parent scale now you're doing it with respect to the parent scale and i'm going to tell you why we need that so g dorian very different now you go to a third degree you're going to get aphrygian b flat lidion c mixolydian as you can see i'm still in the key of f major i'm just playing the everything with respect to c or every sound you're hearing melodically is influenced by this root c so the intervals change you have a minor seventh right there with respect to the lidion you have a sharp four which you feel because it's b flat in the base a you're feeling the flat two which you never had in the major scale which is why the major sounds so calming and normal and poppish while the phrygian sounds more exotic which you haven't really heard that often before so mixolydian then d would be the relative minor relative minor what we also say as aeolian then we have the locrian which is the seventh not so commonly used in mainstream music but definitely a beautiful mode of f major now that's one way to figure things out with the with a single root the other thing is you could form the characteristic triad of that mode which is formed from the key signature of f major so if you take f major what chord works the 135 now you could make it 1357 and it'll be even more modally accurate now if you do f major seventh that works for f ionion g minor seventh works for g dorian then a minor seventh again works for phrygian b flat major seventh works for lidian then c seventh works for c mixolydian oops i forgot that uh the b should have become b flat aeolian remember we are sticking with the key of f major which has that b flat then finally e phrygian where you need an e minor seventh flat five which is the seven chord of the f scale so for some scales especially things like locrian and lidian and even mixolydian the chord matters a lot so if you want to generate the flavor of a mode you really need to spice it with a you need to support it with a useful chord otherwise modes may not sound the way it does so the first way to build modes from a scale would be to just support it with a single root and digest the sound based on the new roots which keep coming based on the scale degrees then you could add chords which makes it makes it very obvious that that is those that is a mode of the f major scale now i keep coming to mode of the f major scale and i've always had this question why do people you know in the first phase of this lesson i said that g dorian is just a scale why do i need to care if it came from f major or not or if it is the second degree of f major or not so i never used it for a while i composed quite a lot of songs on dorian mixolydian i even told myself i'm composing on dorian but i never cared which major scale it came from you know or i always look at the the maths argument right if if c major's relative minor is a minor why can't a minor's relative major be c major which is kind of true but then you dive in even more and you look at major and relative minor to be very simplistic or a very arguably a very trivial way of looking at relative scales because a major scale has seven notes and you're telling me that the six is a natural minor but then you could also tell me that the two is a dorian the three is a phrygian the four is a lidian the five is a mixolydian the six is minor or aeolian the seven is locrian so we could also look at it in a more you can say that modes just take that whole major and relative minor concept to the next level by adding more and more options okay so coming back to now after a few years of using a dorian like a dorian and not caring which major it came from i realized that i had also written a few songs where in the verse section i ended up making it very minor like so in the verse i would play a minor now these are all chords of the d minor scale very aeolian even my melody is very minor now the question is what am i aiming at i want this to be a section of my song which has that minor or that sad quality let's say someone is just trapped in a jail or something waiting to escape so then where is the escape where is the light at the end of the tunnel possibly at the next part of your song which is the chorus so like a struggle very victorious what did i do nothing great i was staying in the key of f major but for the verse i played the minor chords the d minor the g minor and the a minor which are still part of the f major family while in the chorus i went to the major chords that's could be a one four five and go to the next part so i i really think this is another nice way of using modes where now you respect the fact that the aeolian or the major or the natural minor are all part of the same key signature it has the same notes so your audience is going to be like it's still one song because he's using the same scale the same notes or rather the same sets of notes so the audience will feel that the moods are changing sort of like a movie with different scenes but in each scene something different is happening so this is the other perspective which i find you you you'll enjoy when it comes to modes so just to summarize we have two ways of using modes the first way is treat a mode like a scale there will be no others relative this thing modes of the major scale ionian phrygian you don't even need to give it a name if you know the name of the scale from a raga perspective or if you just say okay it's dorian because it's a major scale with a flat three and a flat seven more than enough but with that concept your chords need to be known with respect to that scale like an f minor you'll have the one minor you'll have the two diminished three flat major four minor five minor six flat major seven flat major yeah that's the root so with the first modal perspective you would need to know the scale how to form it with respect to major or otherwise once you have the scale you need to know the available chords treat it like a scale go for it and have some fun but just call it f dorian i'm in the world of f dorian just like how a movie theme is built the they'll they'll not be changing stuff the theme will just be on dorian for the most part so the other perspective of using modes or the textbook perspective was to just write down the modes of the f major scale retain the key signature and there we have it for example f ionian also f major g dorian aphrygian which is the third degree b flat lydian which is the fourth see mixolydian is the fifth d aeolian or minor which is the sixth which is the low korean and yeah you could instead of playing the roots here you could look at chords seventh chords will always be better to really digest the mode so in a nutshell i think modes are just scales eventually they are scales but when you use them with respect to a parent scale like the major scale then they can be interchanged so then you can say you can expand on that whole major relative minor thing and say instead of going from the first to the sixth why can't i go from the first to the fourth or first to the fifth if you do first to the fifth you're then going ionian to c mixolydian and from a songwriting perspective or a production perspective you can look at this as sections of your song f major will be worse um c mixolydian will be the bridge d minor would be the chorus and aphrygian would be the some weird interlude which you want to have somewhere in the middle of the song right guys so hope you found the theory lesson useful there are some supporting notes which will definitely help you to write this down i will be writing it in the key of f so do go through that and i would always encourage you rather than c all the time c is maybe good for analysis try to push yourself a bit further than c which trust me is not easy it's just made out to be easy you can figure this stuff out on any of the 12 keys so modes are they scales are they modes well that's that that were the two perspectives today in the perspective one we've looked at them as just good old scales which have their own chords and their own structural harmony the second perspective we said yes they are all part of the same key signature one flat f major and then we form them accordingly and we stick with the key and you have chord progressions which are salient or characteristic of that particular scale or that particular mode okay more minor chords for the minor scale and more major chords for the major scale again thanks so much for watching the lesson this is jason here from nathaniel do consider hitting that subscribe hit the bell for regular notifications and almost all these chapters are covered in great detail in our nathaniel courses which are either virtual or you can download them or get access to them either on our youtube channel right here by hitting the join button or you can go to nathanielschool.com and we have a video section which you could access patreon is also there do consider following us there for five bucks a month cheers thanks a ton and i will catch you soon