John's Guitar Blog

You’ve probably heard of chords and scales but you may not have heard of modes. If you haven’t, learning the common modes is a GREAT way to train your ear and hone your improvisational skills.

What are modes? Everyone knows there are major keys and minor keys, and that songs in a major key tend to sound cheery while songs in a minor key tend to sound melancholy. That’s such a gross simplification that I hesitate to even put it that way, but you get the idea. Anyway, I like to think of modes as “flavors” of major and minor keys. Instead of thinking of a song being in a minor key, I would think of it being in a Dorian minor, or an Aeolian minor, etc.

When you know the mode of a song, you generally know which individual notes will work (say, in a solo), which chords will work (for the sake of composition), and the overall feel of the song. For example, if someone says we’re about to play a bluegrass song in G, I pretty much know that we’ll be in the Ionian mode. Or if a Latin song is in a minor key, it’s probably a Dorian minor.

Here’s how modes work. Let’s take the C major scale which of course is made up of the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. Now if you start on one note and play the others in succession, you get a different mode for each note that you start on. Here they are:

The only modes which are commonly used are Ionian, Dorian, Mixolydian, and Aeolian, so don’t worry about the other three for now. And by the way, the Ionian mode is equivalent to what most would just call the “major scale”.

It really doesn’t matter what order you play the notes in or where you start. What makes a mode a mode is the set of notes used with a particular chord. For example, any time the notes of the C major scale are used over a D Min chord, you have a D Dorian mode.

Given a chord progression, how do you know which mode a song uses?

If the song is in a minor key then it will use either Dorian or Aeolian. If the IV chord of the chord progression is a major then it’s Dorian and if the IV chord is minor it’s Aeolian. So if an Em song has an A Major chord, then it’s probably E Dorian. If it’s an Em song with an Am chord, then it’s probably Aeolian.

If it’s a major key, then it will most likely use Ionian or Mixolydian. To narrow it down beyond that, you should probably use the melody as a cue. A melody that uses the major 7 (one note below the tonic) would be Ionian. A melody that uses the dominant 7 (two notes below the tonic) would be Mixolydian.

Here are some examples of the common modes and which styles of music you might find them in. I’m speaking broadly here. There are tons of exceptions.

Ionian
* Classical music in a major key
* Nursery rhymes in a major key
* Bluegrass music in a major key
* Old jazz (pre-fusion) in a major key

Mixolydian
* Rock music in a major key
* Blues music in a major key*

Dorian
* Latin music in a minor key
* Old jazz (pre-fusion) in a minor key

Aeolian
* Classical music in a minor key
* Some rock music in a minor key

* Blues songs usually change modes as the chords change.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the theme song to The Simpsons by Danny Elfman uses the Lydian mode.

The list of modes above is not anywhere close to complete. It includes the seven modes of the diatonic scale, but there are other scales such as the Harmonic Minor and the Melodic Minor which spawn their own systems of modes. And for all 21 of these modes, there are individual tweaks you can make resulting in hundreds of others. However, almost all of these are purely academic or antiquated.

Guitarists should learn to play modes as scales over two octaves in varying positions. The positions and fingerings of the scales is worth a whole other article but for starters try learning the four common modes in the key of A in position IV or V and the key of C in position II or III. Then, pick out some songs in each mode to practice soloing over. Here are some recommendations:

Ionian – Blackberry Blossom (bluegrass classic)

Mixolydian – Dark Star (Grateful Dead)

Dorian – So What? (Miles Davis)

Aeolian – Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin)

Happy picking,
— John