In Ionian (major scale) try using a sharp 4th from Lydian or a flat 7th from Mixolydian. In music there are no rules and obviously you can play whatever notes you want and all but these particular "stolen notes" tend to sound really great. If you are playing in any mode, you can steal the notes of the nearby modes. So why go through this trouble? Well there are a lot of useful things to be found poking around these ideas, but I will mention the thing I think is most useful. Eventually you'll jump the Locrian/Lydian gap and the root itself will be moved down, essentially moving everything else up a half step. Every time you do this one note in the mode will be moved down a half step. To move clockwise from any mode, you go to that mode's fifth and say that point is your new root. This circle is a sort of circle of fifths. There is a gap at the bottom between Lydian and Locrian. Moving anticlockwise you get Mixolydian, then Ionian, then Lydian. Moving clockwise you get Aeolian, then Phrygian, then Locrian. Modes have a lot of interesting numerical properties that show up if you spend some time playing around with them. there are 7 ways to spread them out as much as you can, which could also be seen as starting from each of the 7 notes and calling that the root. If you try to pick 7 notes out of those 12 and spread them out as much as possible you will get one of the modes. Other comments explain it well enough but to add something: In the western world at least we generally think about music in 12 tone equal temperment, aka the chromatic scale. Also when you start playing with borrowed chords and modal harmonies, it's way easier when you think of modes harmonically as modified major or minor. I guess what I'm rambling about if you have something in D Dorian it's easier to consider it D minor with a raised 6th rather than C major based around D. If you want to play along it's in Bb Dorian. deadmau5's Ghosts n' Stuff has a Dorian tonality, you can hear it in the melody when he resolves the minor 7th to a major 6th in the scale, and moves from a minor i to a major IV chord at the end of the phrase. Why that's significant is because it gives you a consonant interval to play with and changes the minor iv chord to a major IV chord. Dorian for example is a minor scale with a raised 6th.
![mudic modes mudic modes](http://www.smphillips.mysite.com/images/notes%20of%208%20Church%20modes.gif)
Actually using the modes is easier if you think of them as modified major or minor scales. The basic modes are easy to play if you think of them in relation to the major scale (Dorian based on the second, Phrygian on the third, Lydian on the fourth, you can look up the rest). All are either major or minor (based on the third) but have different colors to them because of the different intervals and how the effect the melody and harmony. Different modes are different scales with different tonalities. This tells us that A Minor (A for the note, minor for the type of scale) is the relative minor scale for C Major. So what the modes are doing are generating scales with different intervals in the SAME key to create different tonalities.įurther, note that the Aeolian mode gives us a minor scale IN THE SAME KEY as C Major. This works because if you look at a piano, the C major scale is a mix of half step and whole step intervals: The next mode, Phrygian, starts on the third note of the C major diatonic scale, E: The next mode, Dorian, means you start on the 2nd note of the diatonic scale:
![mudic modes mudic modes](https://ledgernote.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/mixolydian-mode.png)
(Ionian means you start at the note of your key signature).
![mudic modes mudic modes](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c4/a7/f3/c4a7f311bbd1568fa5883c6a3cd9ae21.gif)
This is your major diatonic scale in Ionian mode. All notes have no accidentals (sharps/flats).