New answers tagged scales
0
Running up and down a scale shape is not music. Forget these shapes and learn an actual song. Learn a solo from a guitarist you like and pick some licks from it to change up and use as part of your own language. Depending on the style you can either learn by ear or get the TABS, transcriptions. Learn some Zep, Yes, Van Halen, Wes, Pat Martino, Hendrix, ...
1
For a start, if you just stick to modes you won't be getting chromatic and you won't be getting whole tone, and they are two flavours well-known in jazz.
1
(TL;DR: harmony and phrasing)
Harmony
You ask "How to achieve harmony?" There's nothing to achieve, some kind of harmonic feeling or "context" always exists. The question is, what to you do to the harmony with your solo, so I transform your question to: "How to achieve an understanding of what I'm doing to the harmony."
Any note can be played over any ...
2
A great exercise is to examine closely many good tunes, and their harmonies.
Check what notes are played on beat one of each bar.
Check the pattern of the rhythm of notes making up the tune.
Check what 'foreign' notes are used - and where they come in a bar.
Check how several notes might get played one way on one chord, and in a similar way on a ...
0
Some ideas:
rhythmic variations of the patterns
add changing notes (e.g. triplets)
passing tones
chromatic approaches to the pentatonic scales
0
That would be a perfectly good start. And it was the approach taken to a whole lot of good, melodic jazz from the Golden Age before everyone got obsessed with 'chord=scale'.
Look at how the original melody fits with the chord notes. Try to make up an alternative melody rather than just playing scales. It's time for a reaction against Jamey Aebersold ...
3
Aebersold and Berklee have a lot to answer for! They formalised a system of improvisation that was teachable and testable. But they gave a generation of players the idea that this was THE way to approach jazz.
It's harder to emulate Armstrong or Beiderbecke 'by numbers' (though their approach CAN be analysed and studied). I recommend you do so, ...
3
First off you came across a standard education method of exposing new students to the connection between modes are chords but that is just one ingredient to understanding music. By the way this connection isn't special to Jazz, it exists in classical music too. Not sure how you derived the statement "...were the ultimate key to jazz improvisation and ...
2
Today's trend in jazz education is to focus a lot on scales, but this
seems to be pretty recent. I think it can be linked to the rise of the
Jamey Aebersold method. He started producing his play-a-longs in the
1970s, and each one contains a primer on "chord/scales." This series
is still being produced and is probably the most popular jazz teaching
aid in the ...
1
The example you quote (playing jazz modes over a 12 bar blues) is a peculiar example. I would say that a classical 12 bar blues harmony (I7, IV7, V7) is a genre different to jazz. It's non-diatonic (no single scale or mode will contain all the notes in that harmony), so the jazz rules don't apply. As I like to say, blues is minor and major at the same time.
...
2
The modal system is just a set of scales to play over chords. This gives you an option of what to play however it does not mean it will sound good. You must train your ear by listening to jazz and you will soon start to come up with lines that fall into the scales.
Answering your second question, limitations of the modal system include that playing purely ...
3
You're approaching music theory from the wrong direction. Take a real piece of music - take LOTS of pieces of music - and see what they actually do. You'll find that some songs do confine themselves to the notes and chords of a single scale, but many don't.
C, Am, F, C. The 'four chord trick' behind a lot of simple pop songs of the 50s and 60s.
C7, ...
0
Your question asks 4 different things and it's actually quite time consuming to answer. There are already some good answers here. I wanted to focus on one thing:
2) If we are playing in Key of C Major and lets say a solo comes , so the solo will be on a C Major scale or its relative minor A minor Scale but not any other scale?
This depends mostly on the ...
0
I suggest learning the formula for building a scale from the chromatic scale and working through that exercise a few times. Then it may help to memorize the notes on each string starting at the nut and naming each note up to the 12th fret. After this is accomplished, it may help you to download a page of guitar neck diagrams from the internet, print it out, ...
3
You have discovered they way I practice scales. If you are playing C mixolydian after playing C maj you are in the Key of F maj. C Dorian is Bb Maj, etc. You are changing key up a 4th each time you change modes like this, and as you discovered the pattern comes back to Ionian but a half step up from where you started. Keep going until you've covered the ...
4
I will try my best to answer your questions.
1) So what I understand is , If we are playing in Key of CMajor , we can play only these chords with Whatever Roman Numeral Chord Progression. And if we have to shift the key, we have to go according to circle of Fifth and that will be Gmajor Key next. Is that correct ?
A1) To your first question/statement "If ...
2
Most ancient Western music, or that of eastern Europe contains intonations and scales that are not common in today's western music. Since the evolution of the 12TET system we've lost some freedom.
There are still groups around the world that practice regional folk music which involve not only alternate tuning of the standard western scales but quarter ...
2
Perhaps what you are looking for is Free Jazz. This is a genre which moves away from western traditions and even from western instruments borrowing from Eastern, Arabic and African music. It is often atonal and abandons the regular metre of traditional music.
2
You coud begin with the reconstructed music of antique Greek music. They have the tetrachords where western music is based on but use 1/4 tone steps. So you could try to sing along and get your ear trained for these intervals.
https://aeon.co/videos/music-was-ubiquitous-in-ancient-greece-now-we-can-hear-how-it-actually-sounded
...
1
Aside from the misspellings of the modes (they end in “an” not “en”) the information seems pretty accurate. I don’t know your reasoning for the chords on the lower half of each box, some are the 4th, some the 5th, 6th, 2nd, what purpose do they serve? Mkorman mentioned they are characteristic of the modes, maybe that it your reason for including them.
My ...
5
Interesting chart! Let's see what it shows and what it doesn't.
It shows a few characterstics of each mode:
The 1st column summarizes specific intervals to each mode (ie: augmented 4th for Lydian, major 6th for Dorian).
Each "cell" shows 2 chords/mode (generally the I and IV chord, but it varies according to the mode, showing the most identifying ones)
...
1
If your root note is C, you could play the flamenco scale. Basically phrygian with an added major 3rd.
If your root note is F, you can use a mix of harmonic and melodic minor.
Anything is ok if you like the sound, there is no music police who will arrest you ;-)
1
I know this has already been answered and accepted but just for another perspective I think this actually is in F Major and not F Lydian. The composer is simply focusing on the dominant, C major, which has the B natural. It's extremely common for pieces to modulate to the dominant (V, C major) and this one just does it immediately.
This was a common ...
1
"Avoid notes" are an idea created by Berklee College of Music's harmony department.
They say that chord tones are the tonic, the third, the fifth, the seventh, and tensions that are a major 9th above a chord tone.
This is not entirely true, since tensions like the b9 and 11 exist on the right scales.
The avoid notes that you're talking about are called ...
3
Write the enharmonic equivalents of D# and A# (=Eb and Bb).
Then you have the progression V-bVII-IV-I. Eb is a borrowed chord of f-minor. (As the other chords are are sus4 we even don’t know whether they’re major or minor. But if you are soloing in f-minor, it will be f- minor - or you have blue notes in mind ...).
Is this o.k.?
Every pthing is o.k. ...
8
If you are basing your harmony off of F minor, this chord progression makes a lot of sense especially wanting to use C major instead of C minor. This is very rooted in the traditional study of harmony by weaving though the 3 minor scales which are F natural minor, F harmonic minor, and F melodic minor which gives the following sets of notes:
F natrual minor ...
4
No scale (I could find) contains those chords.
Well, one scale that definitely contains those chords is the chromatic (12-tone) scale. You're free to use all those notes in whatever way you want!
It's also likely that there's a way to see your progression in terms of diatonic scales too, if that's important to you. But to answer your question directly, If ...
5
This piece is in F Lydian. The Lydian is the fourth mode of the Major Scale: you can think of this as being the notes of any particular Major Scale but using the 4th degree as the tonic (root note). A simple example of a Lydian Mode would be the notes of C Major, but using the 4th degree (F) as the tonic. Coincidentally, this is exactly the mode used here. (...
3
Is A Dorian a G major scale
No.
Both have the same key signature of one sharp.
But they have different tonics. The tonic is the "home" tone of the mode/key.
If you just noodle around either of the two, they might seem interchangeable. If you play with some harmonic sensibility, you will hear the seemingly exact same tones between the two scales don't ...
3
The scale of the A Dorian mode contains all the same notes as the G major scale, and the set of notes can be found by starting on the second note of the G major scale. But that fact doesn't tell you anything about what A Dorian sounds like. The A Dorian modal feeling has almost nothing in common with G major.
A Dorian is a minor mode, G major is not. A ...
2
A-dorian is the Re-Re ladder of the related G-Ionian mode (G-Ionian => "G-major")
As D-dorian is the Re-ladder (related to C-Ionian: C=Do, D=Re and Re is the root tone) A-Dorian is the Re-ladder in G from A-A (Do=G, Ti=F#). So this means A is the root tone of A- "minor" ladder (scale) with an augmented sixth. The melody begins with A and the finalis will be ...
0
"Is A Dorian a G major scale?"
Structurally, yes. It has the same notes in it as G major.
Musically, it has its own identity. The tonic (if we can use terms from functional harmony when takling about modal music) is A. The G note is a minor 7th.
"I’m not a theory guy at all just looking for some help"
Help in doing what?
3
You may be aware of the interval formula for building the major scale,
(w - w - h) - w - (w - w - h)
where w = whole step and h = half step. There are 8 notes, one repeated, and 7 intervals or spaces between notes. I put parenthesis around a common, and repeated, pattern called a tetrachord.
Dorian is built in the following manner,
(w - h - w) - w - (w ...
1
Strictly speaking, A Dorian is not a G major scale. It's not a major scale, and it's not G based.
True, it uses each and every note found in the G major scale, so we call G major its parent scale/key.
But it's actually a minor scale, having its third note (C) a m3 from the root, which is note A.
Dorian is the second mode of major scales, and uses exactly ...
2
A Dorian is one of the 7 scale modes built from the G major scale. It starts and ends on an A so it has all the same notes in it as a G scale. Playing a G scale starting on a B, C, D, etc. will give you 7 different modes (scales) all built from the same 7 notes and each one is unique. It's best not to think of it as a G scale because it has a different tonal ...
0
I'm not familiar with arabic music, but in western terms he is playing something close to the dorian b2 scale (2nd mode of melodic minor). As well as phrygian, as you say. The #4 you refer to I hear more as a temporary b5, making it locrian instead of phrygian for a brief moment.
1
You're mixing up a key signature with a key or tonic of a mode.
A key signature of no sharps and flats is C major...
...or A minor...
...or D Dorian, or E Phrygian, etc. etc.
Basically, all tones except the B could be a possible tonic.
In classical music harmony, specially cadences, define the tonic. Other means, mostly rhythmic, can define the tonic. ...
3
Here's what we know about your melodies:
uses C Major scale
uses D, E, F, G, A
starts on D
"didn't feel resolved ending on C ... [on] a D it sounded resolved"
Your melodies are either in D Dorian or D Aeolian (minor), not C Major.
D dorian is the second mode of C Major so it's understandable that you have confused them with one another. Likewise, they ...
7
Let me take a controversial stance: the tonic is always subjective.
There is no such thing as one objective tonic at any particular point in a compostition. I'm not arguing that the idea of a tonic is useless, though, I'm just saying that the best conceptual understanding of a tonic (or tonal center, or key center, or a bunch of other phrases that refer to ...
2
...other than forcing the listener to come from and go back to the selected note as the center?
I take that to mean devices like repeating a certain tone or rhythmic things like putting a tone on a strong beat or ending of phrases.
That pretty much leaves harmony as the means of defining the tonic.
In the major/minor system cadential harmony defines the ...
5
There are some rare tunes that are only built on notes of the triad of the tonic like a canon:
1111 333- 5555 888- 5588 558- 5533 551- Here we have an absolut clear situation: No cadence but only tonic ... or this fantastic march of the Swiss Army ;)
There are many songs just commuting between tonic and dominant:
"Hey ho, ...
4
The way to figure out what the tonic is, is to see around which note the melody revolves and resolves.
If you have a song that is in C major, the melody will most likely be based around the note C. Take note though, that the melody will emphasize the note C. That means it will be played in cadences, in strong beats etc, if the composer wants to give you the ...
3
There's nothing objective that makes the tonic the tonic. It's a question of judgment and perception, rather than well-defined rules. It's certainly possible to point to conventions within certain styles of music, but nothing definitive.
Sometimes, two people will disagree on what the tonic is. Sometimes it might not be clear that there's an established ...
4
The best way to tell if the tonic has changed is to see if what Schoenberg calls "neutralization" over an extended period of time. Neutralization occurs when a chromatic form of a note is used instead of the original version. For example, in effecting a move from C major to G major, the F# should emphasized to show that we're no longer in C. One method is to ...
1
You really have to listen to the song to determine what the harmonies are doing here. Otherwise, you're just guessing.
After listening to the song, I agree that the song is in G minor, but I also feel a pretty strong pull to B♭ major, the relative major key, right on that F chord. This is a loop of three chords, and I think there's definitely merit in ...
0
This song leaves the prison of minor - major tonality and modes behind. But nevertheless we can hear a tonal center: is it Cm or is it F? or Gm - as you say?
I'd rather say: Cm - dorian (i v IV) The rest is a sequence of IV-I (or I-V) progressions in whole steps downward. Don't look to much for traditional harmonic analysis where there isn't any ...
...
1
Scale tones in G Aeolian = G A Bb C D Eb F
Some extrapolated chords = Gm7, Cm7, FM, EbM7, Bbsus4
The AbM7 is only one half step off (A instead of Ab); the C, Eb, and G are already in the scale. It's impossible to know with certainty the songwriter's process without asking them but perhaps they just liked the sound of a chromatic raise (as so many writers ...
1
The diminished triad doesn't give a strong sense of having a root. Depending on how it's treated, the diminished triad can sound like an incomplete dominant 7th, e.g., D F Ab might be used/perceived as a Bb7 without the root.
It's hard to say much about I ii I as a progression, because it doesn't come off as functional harmony. A better example might be ...
2
There are two parts to your question though that may not be obvious. First, "How does one compose in a minor key?" (even if only for a few bars). Second, "How does one re-write a given piece from a major to minor key?" The answer to the second requires answering the first.
Melodies are not generally too much a problem. One can often tell by ear whether one ...
3
It is not quite clear to me what you are trying to do but I think you are transcribing or changing the progression to a minor key from a major. So, in C major the I and ii chords are C maj and D min. As 7th chords they'd be C Maj7 and D min7. All you need to do to get the correct chords in sequence in a major or minor key is look at the triads created by ...
Top 50 recent answers are included
