This is the first in my series of dissecting the sounds and moods of each mode:
http://www.marktiarra.com/music/guitar_lesson6.html
Hope you find it useful. =]
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You should recall from your previous lesson that E Minor/Aeolian is the sixth mode of G Major/Ionian so they are really the same scale just starting in a different spot.
I think this is a big mistake to tell learners that, it confuses them. They are two different scales - one major and one minor - that happen to consist of the same notes. They are definitely NOT the same scale IMNSHO. In fact, you confirm that, by demonstrating the different moods created by the different scales.
I started with nothing - and I've still got most of it left.
Did you know that the word "gullible" is not in any dictionary?
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You should recall from your previous lesson that E Minor/Aeolian is the sixth mode of G Major/Ionian so they are really the same scale just starting in a different spot.
I think this is a big mistake to tell learners that, it confuses them. They are two different scales - one major and one minor - that happen to consist of the same notes. They are definitely NOT the same scale IMNSHO. In fact, you confirm that, by demonstrating the different moods created by the different scales.
I think we had this discussion in another topic no? The point of the lessons breaking down each mose is to show how different they are sounding. The point of showing how they build off the same single scale helps guitar players remember A LOT faster all the modes and how to cover the neck with them.
The sound and mood of the piece comes more from the rhythm than the lead track as I go into in this lesson. For playing lead, a player can get better faster if he/she first learnes the patterns and then learns the meaning. It's like how you learned to speak English as a child. You heard the words first and learned to form them before you always understood their meaning.
People keep getting the wrong idea and thinking I don't want to show players the unique attributes of each mode and how they set moods. That couldn't be further from the truth. My whole system is about what order you learn things in so you get from point a to point b faster.
You'll see when I do Dorian next week how I start the comparisons of the intervals and lean on the harmony lesson. You have to see these things in sequence from the menu page to see where I'm going with it. It's proven out time and time again with dozens of students now.
I do appreciate you taking the time to look and comment though. You're keeping me sharp having to consider all viewpoints. =]
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I wanted to add to this my underlying theory behind this method:
Your brain remembers patterns much more quickly than it remembers comparitive analysis.
Students often beomce discouraged trying to learn guitar because they just want to make some darn music even if they don't know what they are playing at first.
When you write songs or improvise, you aren't thinking about the theory... you are hearing the next sequence of notes in your head. It's the theory that helps you know where to put your fingers to play the notes you hear in your mind. Knowing the patterns also encomplishes this but with the theory behind it you can go much further.
I wanted a system that could get people learning fast, ENJOYING the learning process and ultimately leaving them with enough knowledge to take it into college level music theory. I've had a student make it into Berklee after less than a year of playing the instrument... I've had numerous students begin playing in performing bands within the first year (two of which have been signed to record deals now); and all my students can tell you what all the modes are, play in many keys up and down the neck and can tell you the mood and interval comparisons of all those modes within that first year as well.
Sorry if I sound defensive but either I'm not making my points well enough in the lesson sequence on my site or something I'm doing is offending the senses of people learning through other methods. Either way if you get what you want out of it and make music you enjoy, that's all that matters in the end.
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One of my wife's favourite quotes is "It's not how you meant to say it, it's how it's perceived by the listener". I'm no expert on modes - believe me. I came to modes from a different direction to most people, but I didn't pursue them, because I had a lot of other things to learn, first, and they were an unnecessary complication at that stage. However, I've repeatedly come across discussions in lessons and forum threads - mostly putting it the way that you have "same scale - different starting point" - and that totally confused me, I couldn't grasp that concept. Worse still, they were all talking about "patterns" and implying that the same patterns were used for modes as for the major (Ionian) scale.
It was only when I saw someone's explanation, that the Dorian, for example, is only a minor scale with a raised vi, that I found the relevance that I'd started out with and which had been thrown into such confusion by the "same scale - different starting point" brigade.
You may well know exactly what it is you want to get across, it's just that, for me, you're not doing it.
Just as we refer to the chord sequence Maj, min, min, Maj, Maj, min, dim as being harmonised to the major scale, I just prefer to think of modes as scales that are harmonised to the original major scale. Where do you think that the "min", in the second position, comes from? It's nothing other than a triad consisting of the 1, 3, 5 degrees of the Dorian mode.
I started with nothing - and I've still got most of it left.
Did you know that the word "gullible" is not in any dictionary?
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Mark,
I'm sure your students are successfull at playing scales. After all, you've eliminated the need for them to rely on anything but muscle memory and that's easily trained.
However, I seriously doubt they understand modes using the method you're using.
Worse, since you're telling them that they should be
. . . [playing] scale . . . during your lead work
I doubt they'll come to understand the roles of both melody and harmony in learning to play lead well either using your method.
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." -- HST
The big problem I see in any of the approaches that say "mode x is the scale starting from note y" is that melodies typically don't start with the root. A melody tells a story, and few writers give away the ending in the first few words; you'll find the vast majority of phrases start somewhere other than the tonic.
So playing in a mode doesn't mean choosing a different starting note, because you won't want that not to actually start your phrases. Playing in a mode means developing a line that uses the mode root as the tonal center.
Most melodies are not modal. Sure, you can do interesting things in modes... but our ears are accustomed to major/minor tonality. That's the structure of the vast majority of music you hear, in almost every genre. Still, some tunes really do have modal melodies.
So I grab a few songsbooks off the shelf, and I look for a tune that actually has has a modal melody. Tim McGraw's "Real Good Man" is the first one I come across. The harmony is a I-IV-V in the key of D major (D5-G-A7). The D 'power chord' is used as the harmony's tonic, avoiding a clash with the melody's repeated use of F natural notes. The melody also routinely uses C natural, which places the melody in D Dorian.
But the melody doesn't start on D, it starts on C - in every verse and chorus. Using 'starting on' logic, a student might think this melody is in C Ionian, which shares the same melody tones, but 'starts from C'. C is never the tonal center, though. In most of the repetitions the melody doesn't end on D or C, but on F natural (which completes a Dm triad with the backing D5 chord, giving the piece the overall minor feel of Dorian mode). On the very last phrase in each verse, the melody descends to the root of D.
The song also has one other feature that's common in some modal tunes - the melody is also stated once in the parallel major key. At the start of the coda, the line "I may be a real bad boy" begins on C#, and also raises the F, placing the phrase solidly in D Ionian. That's immediately followed by "Oh but baby I'm a real good man", starting on D (the closing phrase, and the only one in the song that starts on D!), and using C and F as natural notes again.
This is a typical use of a modal melody, showing the contrast of melody tones against what the harmony would lead us to expect. Approaching D Dorian as a D major scale with a lowered third and seventh (or as a D natural minor with a raised sixth) makes it easy to build phrases like those in this song, melodies that are actually modal, because you're focusing on the tonal center rather than a starting or ending point. Focusing on starting points makes it exceptionally difficult to grasp that.
Back in the 70s I first learned the modes the same way Mark teaches them. That was fine for passing the classroom exams in theory and music history, but there was no practical application of them in school, and I couldn't really see the use until I studied jazz and started using them in parallel.
Modes are a funny thing - the easier they are to 'understand', the harder they are to actually use. So if your goal is to know which notes are in a mode, go ahead and learn them in relation to a major scale - it's a fast way to learn what notes are in each mode. If you actually want to use them to shape melodies, learn them in parallel to major and minor scales, because that's how your ear is trained to find tonal centers.
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Modes are a funny thing - the easier they are to 'understand', the harder they are to actually use. So if your goal is to know which notes are in a mode, go ahead and learn them in relation to a major scale - it's a fast way to learn what notes are in each mode. If you actually want to use them to shape melodies, learn them in parallel to major and minor scales, because that's how your ear is trained to find tonal centers.
Again I said I will be explaining how they relate in parellel as I disect the modes in the lessons here. But I have my students already knowing the patterns before they dissect them. It's easier to dissect something you can visualize already than it is to dissect it and try to remember it at the same time.
As for melody and songwriting and all that... does anyone seriously write songs and melodies based on their knowledge of theory? You feel something in your heart and you hear something in your mind and you write from there. If you are playing with your intellectual skills first you are going to be playing some very stiff music. The intellectual skills just help you get what's in your head out onto your instrument. Play from the inside out, not the outside in.
I've said numerous times now that I'm not teaching anything different than you are saying I am just teaching it in a different order. Is that so hard to understand that it needs to be said over and over again that the modes need to be learned in parrallel or comparitivly when I've already said that's exacxtly what I do AFTER I get a student to know the pattern?
The argument here isn't what to learn about the modes, we all agree on that. The argument is when to teach those things during the course of learning.
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Mark,
I'm sure your students are successfull at playing scales. After all, you've eliminated the need for them to rely on anything but muscle memory and that's easily trained.
However, I seriously doubt they understand modes using the method you're using.
Worse, since you're telling them that they should be
. . . [playing] scale . . . during your lead work
I doubt they'll come to understand the roles of both melody and harmony in learning to play lead well either using your method.
No one learns melody through excersizes and books. That comes from your musical influences and your inner ear. The better you know the modes, the more you know how to get what's in your head onto the guitar. There are some fantastic players who never learned a single note name or scale but they did have to fumble around and learn those same patterns so they could translate what's in their head.
You teach a student to play melody by having him/her hum a part to you and then try to play it on guitar. You have them limited to only playing three notes an entire lead and see what they can squeeze out of it creatively. You have them learn other songs that are a great means of influence.
At the end of the day the modes and everything music theory are just tools to get what's in your mind out into the real world and all I want to do is establish that in a student's mind as fast as possible so they can get to making music instead of parroting scales.
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At the end of the day the modes and everything music theory are just tools to get what's in your mind out into the real world and all I want to do is establish that in a student's mind as fast as possible so they can get to making music instead of parroting scales.
Getting to making music is of course the goal. I merely disagree that your method is effective.
I play jazz.
I knew all the patterns and the mode names and figured that was what I needed to know, because I had lots and lots of teachers and read lots and lots of books that have just the approach you're using.
But when it came down to where the rubber hit the road, I was very ignorant of how this stuff is usefull.
Worse, because I thought I understood modes, based on years of the very same method you're using, I didn't know I was ignorant.
Luckily, I was in a very bad accident that injured me to the point where I couldn't play the guitar. So I took up an instrument that didn't require the same kind of dexterity to get around.
Horns require you learn scales by their notes rather than by patterns, and after spending 2 years learning scales, I finally came to see that as a musician my knowledge of modes as essentially bankrupt thanks to having bought into the method you espouse.
If you can be successfull, then bully for you. But I very much doubt that you are being as successfull as you think you are.
My personal experience very much parrallel's Noteboat's. Moreover, I know of not a single jazz guitarist that thinks in the terms you're suggesting. Indeed, to a musician they denounce pattern learning as an impediment to real knowledge of the instrument because students think that because they can play the scale they don't have to do anything more than that to learn the scale.
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." -- HST
You should recall from your previous lesson that E Minor/Aeolian is the sixth mode of G Major/Ionian so they are really the same scale just starting in a different spot.
I think this is a big mistake to tell learners that, it confuses them. They are two different scales - one major and one minor - that happen to consist of the same notes. They are definitely NOT the same scale IMNSHO. In fact, you confirm that, by demonstrating the different moods created by the different scales.
Why do we keep on having these conversations about modes?
What we all need to remember is that if we are playing E Aeolian, we are not in the key of Em, but the key of G Major. To suggest that Em is the G scale starting at a different point is dangerous - E Aeolian is the G Major scale starting at a different point certainly, but the cadence is different in minor keys (B7 -> Em, there is no D# in the key of G Major)
Best,
A :-)
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As for melody and songwriting and all that... does anyone seriously write songs and melodies based on their knowledge of theory?
As a beginning, the inspiration, the starting point? That's a qualified no. (Qualified, because in certain types of 12-tone composition the answer is nearly always yes; in other styles it's done, but it often gives you a sense that it's not so great)
But once you have the seed, what do you do? I know of very few composers who jump out of bed in the morning with a 3 minute song fully realized in their imagination, let alone a 7 minute or longer movement for a classical piece.
So you take your starting seeds and you see what you can do with them. You apply compositional tools (which all come from theory!) to see if you can do something better. You try the melodic seeds in retrograde. You invert them. You look for common tones. You reharmonize. You try things out in different registers. You look for other ways to lead the voices. You search out weak combinations and change them.
Composing music is like creating any other art. Great novels are not first drafts, and 'inspired' paintings are usually done after dozens of compositional sketches. There's inspiration, and there's editing and re-working. It's the editing and re-working that makes passable ideas turn into good works, and inspired ideas into great ones.
As 100 people to name the most famous piece of music, ever, in any genre. I'll bet the piece named most often is Beethoven's Symphony No.5. The main theme is just four notes long... and it took him four years to compose the piece. It's a masterwork of how a simple fragement can be developed, and I have no doubt that theory played a far larger role in its creation than simply waiting for the muse to dump it finished into his head.
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I will agree Beethoven's 5th stands as an excellent example of someone who may have written based on theory moreso. I recall he agnozied over the most minute of details and played various versions on themes just to compare them. I would assume theory took a large role in deciding the list of items to try out.
As to Kingpatzer's comments... I will agree that for a Jazz player it becomes much more about chord voicings and less about modes but again I don't get into that until later.
What befuddles me here is it would seem people are getting the impressions that I suggest teaching different information and I keep saying time and time again it's about what order you learn it in to speed up the process. Pattern recognition happens much faster than analysis. You could explain to someone who's never seen shapes the difference between a circle and a square but if they see the shapes first and know them visually, then the explanations make much more sense and are retained faster.
In the end, we all want to make good music that moves people emotionally when they hear it. There have been players that couldn't tell you thing one about any theory that have accomplished this and players that know it inside and out. The fact that the former exists lends me to feel that the pattern recognition ON GUITAR ANYWAY is the most important key to getting the sounds in your head out onto the guitar. Learning the theory behind it helps you in the ways you are talking about as you continue on with your progress as a musician... and knowing those patterns makes learning what you are talking about happen faster.
With all this talk of music and methods I would love for everyone to share their music and put their money where their mouths are. Being that I seem to have raised people's ire, I'm sure you won't be going in with open minds but I'll share anyway. I'd love to hear what ya'll have too:
Santa's Claws... a bit fusiony.
http://www.marktiarra.com/music/marktiarra_music/santasclaws.mp3
Kyle Smiles... a bit more melodic.
http://www.marktiarra.com/music/marktiarra_music/kylesmiles.mp3
Nothing speaks the truth of a method more than the results.
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With all this talk of music and methods I would love for everyone to share their music and put their money where their mouths are. Being that I seem to have raised people's ire, I'm sure you won't be going in with open minds but I'll share anyway. I'd love to hear what ya'll have too:
Nothing speaks the truth of a method more than the results.
Mark,
This is a friendly note from a Moderator. And a fellow teacher if you'd like.
This kind of debate is not helping you in the least. These people are simply pointing out things that their experience has shown them. The same way you are.
My partner Karen (a piano teacher) and I often teach things in entirely different ways. Anyone who's been teaching for any length of time knows that a method that works for one student may not help a second student in the least. Most teachers who teach straight out of method books instead of custom-designing lessons for their individual students, tend to get erratic results.
I currently have forty private students. Half of them aren't going to even hear about modes for years. But if they were all learning them right now, I'd be teaching modes in forty different ways. Some would certainly grasp it with your ideas. Many might, after supplementing their learning with other ideas. And some would have to come to an understanding of modes through other means. And, of course, some would never get them.
Results, as you call them, often seem to be a result of a combination of things: Method, teacher and student. Of these three items, it's been my experience that the student ultimately holds the most power in the equation. And method the least. It's up to the teacher to make the best combination of it all to explain things and to (hopefully) produce results.
Let's all keep it civil here, folks. I'm getting older and grumpier by the minute! :wink:
Peace
With all this talk of music and methods I would love for everyone to share their music and put their money where their mouths are. Being that I seem to have raised people's ire, I'm sure you won't be going in with open minds but I'll share anyway. I'd love to hear what ya'll have too:
Nothing speaks the truth of a method more than the results.
Mark,
This is a friendly note from a Moderator. And a fellow teacher if you'd like.
This kind of debate is not helping you in the least. These people are simply pointing out things that their experience has shown them. The same way you are.
My partner Karen (a piano teacher) and I often teach things in entirely different ways. Anyone who's been teaching for any length of time knows that a method that works for one student may not help a second student in the least. Most teachers who teach straight out of method books instead of custom-designing lessons for their individual students, tend to get erratic results.
I currently have forty private students. Half of them aren't going to even hear about modes for years. But if they were all learning them right now, I'd be teaching modes in forty different ways. Some would certainly grasp it with your ideas. Many might, after supplementing their learning with other ideas. And some would have to come to an understanding of modes through other means. And, of course, some would never get them.
Results, as you call them, often seem to be a result of a combination of things: Method, teacher and student. Of these three items, it's been my experience that the student ultimately holds the most power in the equation. And method the least. It's up to the teacher to make the best combination of it all to explain things and to (hopefully) produce results.
Let's all keep it civil here, folks. I'm getting older and grumpier by the minute! :wink:
Peace
I'm sorry, I didn't think I was being uncivil but it's hard to read someone's tone from a post I guess.
In any case you certainly make the wisest point of all which is that there are many ways to acheive the same result and each person has a best way for him or herself to get there.
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