The Modal Scales: Lydian, Ionian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Aeolian, Phrygian and Locrian

Click the play button below to listen to my podcast on the modal scales:

Here is a transcript of the podcast if you want to follow along:

Good morning. This is Duane. This is “More Good Stuff, You Really Ought to Know.” Today, I’d like to take a look at some of the church modes from the middle ages. These are the modal scales that you may have heard about. They’re coming back into vote mail in a big way, especially with the fusion groups. Fusion is a style of music that lays somewhere between Jazz and rock and is quite sophisticated, and a lot of those fusions guys are using a lot of these scales, these modes, these church modes to get unusual sounds and improvising on them. It would be well to just get kind of familiar with them.

Here are the church modes and their intervals:

• Dorian: WHWWWHW (like playing the C scale from D to D)

• Phrygian: HWWWHWW (like playing the C scale from E to E)

• Lydian: WWWHWWH (like playing the C scale from F to F)

• Mixolydian: WWHWWHW (like playing the C scale from G to G)

• Aeolian: WHWWHWW (like playing the C scale from A to A — also known as the A natural minor scale)

• Locrian: HWWHWWW (like playing the C scale from B to B)

• Ionian: WWHWWWH (Does that look familiar? It ought to — it’s just a major scale!)

Let’s play through each one of them. First of all, there’s the Lydian, Ionian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Aeolian, Phrygian and Locrian. The Lydian, [Duane playing piano] we’re going to start on C on all of them. The tonic, [Duane playing piano] supertonic, median, [Duane playing piano] subdominant, [Duane playing piano] dominant, [Duane playing piano] submedian, [Duane playing piano] leading tone.

Another words, it’s just like the C major scale except what? [Duane playing piano] The fourth is raised a half step, so you have a raised fourth on the subdominant, on the fourth. Tonic is just another [Duane playing piano] word for the one, [Duane playing piano] supertonic two, [Duane playing piano] median three, subdominant [Duane playing piano] four. This is a raised fourth, [Duane playing piano] dominant, [Duane playing piano] submedian, [Duane playing piano] leading tone. [Duane playing piano] Then of course the octave or the tonic, back to the tonic.

Lydian is just like the C scale [Duane playing piano] except for what? [Duane playing piano] Except you raise the fourth. Ionian is the C scale. [Duane playing piano] No difference there, but that was just one of the church modes that was used, and that’s equivalent to our major scale. Mixolydian is like our, [Duane playing piano] C scale, except the seventh is flat. [Duane playing piano] It’s kind of like if you improvised on that, [Duane playing piano] you’d just be like improvising on C seventh all the time. [Duane playing piano]

Dorian is like a minor seven, in other words we have a [Duane playing piano] flat third, and a flat seventh. [Duane playing piano] If I was going to improvise on that, I’d play C minor seventh in my left hand because you say [Duane playing piano] I have the root, the flat third, the fifth and the seventh, a stack of thirds. [Duane playing piano]

Then you may say yes, but how do you apply it to other keys? It’s in fact mathematically exactly the same. In other words, if my left hand’s [Duane playing piano] playing a minor seventh chord in C, then any other minor seventh chord [Duane playing piano] I play would be based on that Dorian mode, wouldn’t it? I could [Duane playing piano] move up to there. Any minor seventh chord I chose, [Duane playing piano] I just improvise off of. You see that?

Aeolian is … [Duane playing piano] I’ll play it. C, [Duane playing piano] D, [Duane playing piano] E flat, [Duane playing piano] F, [Duane playing piano] G, [Duane playing piano] A flat, [Duane playing piano] B flat and C. [Duane playing piano] In other words lower third, sixth and seventh, like the Dorian except … [Duane playing piano] it’s a tighter sound. [Duane playing piano] If I improvised on it, I’d probably want to play that A flat in the left hand chord. [Duane playing piano] You see that? That kind of thing.

Phrygian. [Duane playing piano] Start on the one, you go to the flat two right away … a little different than we’ve already had. Then flat three, [Duane playing piano] four, [Duane playing piano] five, [Duane playing piano] flat six, [Duane playing piano] flat seven. [Duane playing piano]

To see what the modes look like on music notation, click here: https://www.playpiano.com/101-tips/46-modal-scales.htm

For a chord, I’d probably use it like a suspension, I’d probably voice it in force, C, [Duane playing piano] F, [Duane playing piano] B flat, [Duane playing piano] because that encompasses both all the notes or all the notes in that chord are members of that [Duane playing piano] scale. Then I’d improvise on that. That flat second, certainly gives it a different sound, doesn’t it? [Duane playing piano]

Nice kind of … I don’t know, incipient kind of mood where you feel like something is going to happen. Locrian also has a flat second, [Duane playing piano] and a flat third, [Duane playing piano] fourth, but it also has a flat fifth, [Duane playing piano] flat sixth and seventh. [Duane playing piano] Locrian is like you’re playing all the black keys if your finger is in key of C, except two white keys, C and F. [Duane playing piano] The root in the fourth are normal but the rest are all flat. [Duane playing piano] That’s kind of nice [Duane playing piano] because you don’t have to worry about which black keys to use. You can use them all, right?

Now the exciting thing about improvising on these is to move from one to the other. In other words you start on say Locrian and move to mixolydian for the bridge of a song or the Ionian or the Lydian. You change modes and that changes the feeling when you change the mode, doesn’t it?

Experiment around. As usual think about it, let it hatch in your subconscious mind, work on one of these and then another later on and so on, and just add to your knowledge of good stuff that “You Really Ought to Know.” See you next month.

For more information on the modal scales, see this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(music)