"simply, Modes." Simply Explained ...

[MikeRobinson]

I don't pet little monkeys after lunch ... and I strongly suggest that you shouldn't either.  Something about those bananas they eat (or maybe it's the little foo-foo drinks that usually accompany them) really pisses them off.  Plus, it reminds me much too much of Music Theory class, where that line was actually a mnemonic device that I rather-desperately used to remember this:  Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian.  (Damm, it must have worked ... professor, be ye proud.)

 

I remembered those words exactly long enough to pass the course, then forgot about them for the next twenty years ... until I finally learned what they were really talking about, and why it could actually be very useful to me (or, to you) as a songwriter and composer.  I promise that I won't mention those words again.  (Class is over... you graduated, maybe, and eventually paid-off your student loans, maybe.  Welcome to the rest of your life.)

 

Now, let's do them.  Let's do Modes, and those pseudo-latin names that were worth 25 points on the final.  Turns out, it's easy.

 

Grab your handy piano keyboard and play one of those one-handed songs that you find on the first three pages of the first music books.  Say, Merrily We Roll Along.  Park your hands on the all-white keys beginning with Middle C, and, without playing any chords, play the melody.  Slightly emphasize the "C" and the "G" as you play.

 

(So, how does it feel to be seven years old again?  Two more years until you grew enough to reach the pedals ...?)

 

Now for some bona fide magic.  Here goes ...  

 

Shift your hands two places to the left, and, still on the all-white keys and still without playing any chords, play Merrily again.  (Where you were playing "C," now play "A," and just do the all-white-keys as you did before.)  E-D-C-D-E-E-E now becomes C-B-A-B-C-C-C and so on.

 

Now, listen.  No, I mean it.  Play it again.  Now, listen... until you stop focusing on what you're doing and can hear what you are doing.

 

OMG!  (Okay, okay:  "WTF?!")  It sounds minor!  And, in fact, it is.

 

Okay, more magic.  Two places to the right.  Play Merrily again, all white keys, centered on E in place of C.  Different again!  

 

We're on a roll, here.  Let's do magic seven times.  Just keep doing that until you've tried all seven starting white-keys.  And what you'll immediately see is that all of them sound different ... sometimes very much so ... even though every one of them used only the white keys.

 

But ... why?

 

Here's the "simple explanation" I promised you:  "now, look at the black keys."  You know that there are 12 keys in the total scale, and that each adjacent key, white or black, is one so-called "half step" from its neighbor.  This means that five of those white keys are a "whole step (= 2 half-steps)" apart, because there's a black-key in between, but that keys #3 (E-to-F) and #7 (B-to-C) are only a half-step away from their upper neighbor since there is no black-key in-between.  

 

Therefore, if you played the C-major scale (all white keys starting with "C"), even though the keys that you played were "all white, and obviously 'next to each other,'" in fact they were not.  In fact, you played a mixture of whole and half steps, with the half-steps in positions 3 and 7.

 

Not coincidentally, "positions 3 and 7 are 'a fifth apart.'"  (A fifth:  E - F - G - A - B ... 1 2 3 4 5.  A fifth.  E-to-F would have been a "second," E-to-G a "third" and so on.  All the way to an "eighth," which we prefer to call an "octave."  But, I digress.)

 

So, what happened when you shifted your hands?  You shifted (actually, rotated) the placement of the half-steps in that underlying sequence!  When you shifted your hands two places down (or, six places up ...) to "A," then the half-steps – which previously were at positions 3 and 7 – now occupied various different places on the scale that you were then playing, although they remained a (rotated) fifth apart.

 

Let me say it again:  When you played "Mer-ri-ly" as (shifted right ...) C-B-A instead of E-D-C, a half-step got in the way.  These three notes that formerly had been a whole-step apart, weren't a whole-step apart anymore, because there's only a half-step between C and B (whereas there had not been, between E and D).  Furthermore, the outer neighbors C and A are also a half-step closer than E and C had been.  Yeah, even though we are still playing "all white keys," truly everything has changed.

 

And that, Virginia, is what "modes" are.  

 

It is both generally and categorically true that:  notes that are "next to one another" in your melody, are not necessarily "next to one another" in actual tone.  However, within any and every "scale," there is a regular pattern to their spacing.  And so, what you're actually doing, with each mode, is re-arranging that pattern ... while ... (importantly!) ... doing it in a consistent way.   Every re-arrangement is a rotation.

 

(okay, up for air now ... breathe  breathe  breathe ... 'cuz I'm gonna toss one more thing at ya)

 

There's another way to achieve this "rotation."  Yes, you can also do the exact same thing another way!  You can keep your hands exactly where they started.  Always "E-D-C-D-E-E ... etc"), and continue to slightly-emphasize C and G, but now, do it in different keys.  Now you are not continuing to play "all white keys." You're respecting the sharps-and-flats of whatever key you're in.  But...  you are continuing to emphasize to your ear that "the root of what I'm playing is [not "the home of the key that I am now in", but ...] the note 'C' (sharped or flattened as the key-signature prescribes)," and that "the fifth is 'G' (ditto)."  The center of your melody hasn't shifted to G!  No, it's still at C, and so, if you look closely at what you're doing, you'll see that, thanks to the sharps and flats, the sequence of whole and half-steps has shifted beneath your fingers as before, even though your hands haven't moved.

 

(Don't let me lose you here:  "the pattern of sharps and flats" that corresponds to (say) "the key of 'G'" just happens to be exactly the right ones to produce the same arrangement of whole-and-half-steps that you plainly saw in "all-white keys starting-and-ending with 'C'," when you decide to start your octave with 'G', instead.  All key-signatures are like that, and this is why.  If you want to start at such-and-such note, and preserve that same w-w-h-w-w-w-h pattern of steps, the key-signature for that note tells you which notes must be sharpened or flattened.  

 

(So far so good?  Cool.  Now, make the intuitive leap:  "ergo, how do you shift the pattern without physically shifting your hands?"  Right you are!  You pick a different key-signature, thereby shifting the pattern, then you don't shift your hands!  Q.E.D.)

 

(whew!!  Okay, class is over now.)

 

There's actually a fairly-endless fountain of possible creativity here, because "'the scale' of your tune" can actually be anything you like, as long as the set of notes is consistent.  (Does it have to be w-w-h-w-w-w-h?  No.  Does it have to be twelve (or seven, or five) tones?  No!)  You might have seen that when you played a very oriental-sounding (pentatonic ...) melody using only the black keys of the keyboard.  "The scale of your tune" is whatever you want it to be.  It will become the most-elemental framework against which every other aspect of the song is hung.  Every note in your "scale" will be separated from its neighbor by some "interval," and there will be some pattern to those intervals, just as there is with "all white keys" or, for that matter, "all black ones."  There's a naturally-occurring system of tensions inherent in every one of those intervals (and even the notes, which in fact are not equally-spaced), which you can take advantage of in your music.

 

Just remember to be sparing, and thereafter consistent.  The ear can only take so much.  Establish from the outset what "the 'normal' for your music" is going to be, whatever it is.  ("Modes," as described, work because they are still "rotations" of that prevailing "normal," hence an acceptable variation.)  It's possible to stray so far-away from the main stream here that you just confuse-the-hell out of your listener, but it's also possible to serve him something he's never heard before, using "just the same twelve white-and-black notes."  (Or-r-r-r-r....)

Edited February 6, 2014 by MikeRobinson

[MikeRobinson]

Y'know, Tom ... I've been thirty(!) years now in the I.T. business – watching it all go straight to <<a country-song lyric>> while not-so patiently (frantically ...) hoping to make a cross-career break into "21st century Music."  So, I reckon that "the last thing that the world needs is Another [independent] Blog.â„¢"

 

I'd frankly rather to contribute content to yours!  You've got momentum, so I don't have to.

 

It makes far more sense to me, to contribute useful(?) content to a well-known place where many thousands of like-minded people already congregate, than to carve-out (at my own expense) a unique-to-me yet one-of-a-kind place and pray to The Gods of Google to inform the rest of the world that such a place even exists.  I want to get the word out ... and to connect with fellow musicians who wasted time memorizing drivel about little monkeys ... not to set up yet-another printing press of my own.  (Getting "other people's word out" is, at the moment at least, my day job.  Equals yuck scotty beam me out of here.)

 

Happy to be a [staff?] columnist.  Used to be a trainer/writer/teacher.  Hope to sell a lyric to a rubber man.  Don't need to be a blogger.  If you got a thing to say, go to where people already are.

Edited February 6, 2014 by MikeRobinson

[Kel]

Mike,

 

I'm going to act like a terribly annoying fourteen year old in a moment, but before I do, I'll let you know where I'm coming from....

 

I am in my 50s, was in IT when it was DP (it had just dropped the E!) and got out of it when I discovered windows are more than an operating system. I have only hever had about 3 years of music teaching on a formal basis, all playing piano (though I did top Music in senior high school without performing!). I've played (on and off) piano and guitar for over 40 years. I've been writing music (seriously) for around 2 years. I consider myself knowledgeable of theory but don't claim mastery, can (and do) read music and write by placing pencil marks on a manuscript page (old school!)...

 

I ask "Why do I need to know what you wrote about "modes""

 

Respectfully,

 

Kel

[Just1L]

Y'know, Tom ... I've been thirty(!) years now in the I.T. business – watching it all go straight to <<a country-song lyric>> while not-so patiently (frantically ...) hoping to make a cross-career break into "21st century Music."  So, I reckon that "the last thing that the world needs is Another [independent] Blog.â„¢"

 

I'd frankly rather to contribute content to yours!  You've got momentum, so I don't have to.

 

It makes far more sense to me, to contribute useful(?) content to a well-known place where many thousands of like-minded people already congregate, than to carve-out (at my own expense) a unique-to-me yet one-of-a-kind place and pray to The Gods of Google to inform the rest of the world that such a place even exists.  I want to get the word out ... and to connect with fellow musicians who wasted time memorizing drivel about little monkeys ... not to set up yet-another printing press of my own.  (Getting "other people's word out" is, at the moment at least, my day job.  Equals yuck scotty beam me out of here.)

 

Happy to be a [staff?] columnist.  Used to be a trainer/writer/teacher.  Hope to sell a lyric to a rubber man.  Don't need to be a blogger.  If you got a thing to say, go to where people already are.

 

 

Amen to that brother. You and I's in the same boat.

[MikeRobinson]

@Tom – It's gonna sound really embarrassing that I didn't know about those pages.

 

@Kel – 

 

Like you, I'm a DP-geek by trade, probably of similar age, who also writes music with a score. 

 

(Except that I now use "MuseScore," http://www.musescore.org, which is an excellent free, multi-platform score writing tool, especially if you download and use better (larger ... also free ...) SoundFonts to go with it.)  Trust me, sometimes "free" is good, whether or not (and not because) it is free.  Folks tell me about Sibelius and I frankly don't think I'm missing much.  The tool is powerful, flexible, stable, and good.

 

I am also very interested in "figuring out how things work, so that I can then 'work' them."  Stuff like "the harmonic series," how notes work for and against each other, "equal temperament," pure-geek stuff that, like working with computers themselves, is genuinely interesting and therefore enjoyable to me, as long as I can move it from the purely theoretical to something that's actually boots-on the-ground useful to me.  (Okay, call me crazy that way ... (wink!) ... but I found my areas of genuine lifelong interest early.)

 

 

 

I know that I really would have pissed-off the Wizard of Oz, because I would have walked right over there "behind the little curtain," and started trying to figure out the dials and switches and knobs that made the thing work.

 

"How did he [know to] go in that direction?  Because he knew that the hidden doorway was there – and where it leads."

 

I also don't like obtuse explanations of what, I know, ought to be simple things.  For example, I was offended that I had to memorize that line about little monkeys or risk failing the final exam – which is another byzantine educational practice IMHO.  No one ever told me what "modes" really were, nor how they worked, nor why.  Same thing with the Circle of Fifths:  better be able to draw it, or else, but for the most part that was the extent of where it went.  (Maybe I just had a really bad teacher.)

 

Anyhow, maybe kids discover them when they put their hands on the keyboard in the "wrong" place, and maybe their music teachers reach over and grab their little hands and "correct" their "mistake."  (As mine did.)  But this also counts, to me, as a real musical discovery.  You might do it entirely by accident.  Or, you might compose a piece of music and sit down to play it – or have MuseScore play it for you – and "oops that's not the right starting point for this key" and maybe it sounds awful or maybe it sounds unexpectedly right.  Different, but right.  And yet, you don't know why.  Much like the first time you paid attention to the black keys and ignored the white ones, and said dumb things to your kid brother that you thought sounded Chinese.  If you were a geek like me, you said, "Why is that?"  Maybe no one had the answer for you, but you wondered anyway.

 

Modes are something that you can easily do – DAWs often have these features in their "piano rolls" – and they are, or at least they were to me, a completely unexpected surprise.  Once I realized what they actually were, and started seriously fooling around with them, it was another hidden door.  Hid, for all this time, by a phrase about those dammed "little monkeys" and an 'educational' (sic) system that was content with rote memorization.  Later on, I learned that some cool jazz stuff is done by putting the melody in one mode and the accompaniment in another.  I had no idea; never thought of that.  But I do understand why it could be done, and what its result might be, and yeah, I'm "nerding" around with that idea.

Edited February 6, 2014 by MikeRobinson