Yep. Totally legit if you’re a jazz artist. But how many guitarist have the goal of learning to improvise over jazz lines, regardless of how valuable it could be to them educationally speaking? Proportionately, the number is undoubtedly small.
Barry Harris (one of my all-time musical heroes) and other more traditional jazz musicians prominent in jazz before the advent of modal jazz in the 1950s would argue that they didn’t know anything about modes, but they could play jazz. Modes aren’t the only approach to learning jazz improvisation.
I’m not against learning about modes. But I do think it’s over emphasized, at the expense of other, equally valuable approaches to learning improvisation.
Absolutely true. Most jazzbos don’t think in modes while playing any more than you and I think in verb conjugations or sentence diagrams when we speak. But we learned those things, not to mention the alphabet, spelling, grammar, vocabulary words, and how to read and write.
Everyone is different, but I view knowing modes and all the various aspects of music theory as acquiring the building blocks inherent in learning any language. Sure, it’s possible and sometimes advantageous to get by musically with just the fundamentals. God knows I have. But I dig packing stuff like modes away and having them bubble up later, while I’m playing.
Jazz is no more just playing chromatically than speaking coherently is just spewing words. I love listening to great jazz lines and analyzing their harmonic structure.
Blame Coltrane and Davis.
It’s really their fault, lol.
They made modes sathing and mysterious and cool and something that the non-hip folks didn’t know really.
It’s not even modern jazz, it was popularized by Miles Davis. I do enjoy it as a change from bebop.
I think it’s popular because some people think it’s going to unlock a new level of options for creativity. Music doesn’t care about modes or borrowed chords or whatever you want to call them. There are so many people on the theory subreddit asking “I like how this sounds, why does it sound good?” I don’t care why, only that it does.
A lot of the arguing about modes stems from how one is going to use them… You can use them as a colour scale and you can use them to solo over chords independent of the key. Some jazz purists will argue to the death that they’re not a scale.
I’ve had many arguments about what key something is vs what mode it’s in and a big part of that is how you’re going to notate it vs how you hear it. I’ve been insulted and told I don’t know what I’m talking about and I just think that because I’ve listen to some song I’ve never heard before. Many people have their one way of looking at things, the way they were taught in music school and they have no ability to see it in different ways.
When I was much younger, I played classical and big band music for about ten years and took theory for a few years in high school; I don’t recall ever hearing about modes. It wasn’t until more recently when I picked up the guitar again and started watching YT videos and reading forum posts that I learned about them and how obsessed with them a lot of guitarists are.
I do think that there’s a general hatred for them on a lot of music forums because most people asking about them are new to music and they think they’re something amazing they need to unlock .
Much of the teaching about modes isn’t very good either, they almost always get taught in C Major which confuses people into thinking the modes are always those notes. Most people learn the modes but never learn why/how to use them.
Mark Smith teaches about modes in his Scales Essentials course. He also teaches playing them through the Cycle of Fourths, which is outstanding practice for many reasons.
Again, if someone has no interest or use for modes, that’s fine. Leave them be.
But modes can and do serve a purpose for creating diatonic melody and bass lines from chord charts, in jazz and other music genres.
When we speak, we don’t always have verb conjugations or sentence diagrams dancing through our heads; we just speak to communicate. Accomplished players speak music through their instruments, without necessarily keeping scale or mode structures in mind. But modes can be building blocks for making music, just as grammar and vocabulary words can be for speaking.
I learned modes years ago on piano, but learning them on bass has been rewarding to me in terms of providing great fretting hand technique practice and memorizing the fretboard. YMMV.
It’s not a matter of picking a mode to create a melody or bass line from. Modes are very useful for creating a diatonic line over an entire progression.
Well if anyone is still interested in them after reading all that, here’s Leonard Bernstein teaching them to some kids. Complete with orchestra for demonstrations.
At the very least he demonstrates how excited you can get for them.
As Josh pointed out in his “5 Mistakes that are SLOWING You Down” video, learning modes can help players understand how many bass lines are composed, and how they can be used to improvise fills and solos.
Playing through modes up and down the neck is also great fingering technique practice.
I’ve been planning on learning modes, I guessmainly because I’m a big fan of Beato’s channel.
I came across a Josh video about the Major scale. (Lonian, I think?) He recommends practicing the scale, then playing melodies with it. Phenomenal. I’m just starting module 3 of Bass Buzz but I’ve figured out so much from that approach.
I added the minor and minor melodic scale. Whatever modes those are.
Now I’m wondering if that is enough. Was planning to add another scale every couple of days.
Whatever you do just don’t get bogged down and frustrated with the modes.
I will be 73 this year and have been actively involved in music since I was 7 years old.
I have dabbled with modes on and off for many years but could never find a real use for them.
Then just a week ago I had a major breakthrough, or epiphany if you will, thanks to @MikeC.
Over the years I have written a few songs that I just could not get the right chord progressions for to reflect the mood I was trying to project. Changing to a different mode changed that.
It’s weird but for years I had no time for modes and could not see a use for them but now I do not know how I ever lived without them. I jam a lot and a lot of times the lead sheets supplied are not really correct. Most of the time I can correct them but sometimes I just run into a song that I cannot find the right chord for. Now I can quite easily correct them by just switching to a different mode for the same key.
I could also never understand why any song would have a diminished seventh chord in it but as I figured out the chords in different modes I kept seeing the diminished 7th popping up as a I IV and V chord.
Again, just don’t get lost in discussions on modes. Everything you need to know to learn the bass is in the B2B course and you will not find an in depth discussion of modes there.
In the end it will all work out just practice and have fun. It’s all good
Just learn Ionian (Major scale) and Aeolian (Minor) and that is all you will need for 90% of music for most genres, with Math Rock, Jazz and Blues being the big exceptions. Josh covers both in the course.
I guess it is easy to get confused and blend things together with scales and modes. As others have pointed out, it is likely not necessary to have an intricate knowledge if you, e.g., never intend to dive more into jazz, and so learning these things slowly (and in context) is probably the best way.
But, just to clarify your statement cited above: when you say “minor”, you probably refer to the “natural minor” scale, which also happens to be one of the modes of the major scale (i.e, the aeolian mode).
The melodic minor scale (as well as the harmonic minor scale and some others) have - in contrast to the natural minor scale - NO relation to the major scale, but are scales in their own right, and as such, have modes of their own (this is where it gets a bit hairy, of course).
Bottomline: there are many scales, but not all scales are equally important. Modes are derived from scales by starting at a different degree of the scale.
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