By Mark Slater |
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Ear Fusion Guitar Lessons - How To Play By Ear Modes OK, now that we understand major versus minor, let’s get a little more in depth. If you recall that we said that A is the 6th note of C major and by starting on A, playing the notes from C major, we get A minor. Now A is just the 6th note of C, what about all the other notes? Can’t we start a scale from any of these notes? Yes we can. You can use any notes of a scale as you root note. Staying with the key of C major, you could start with any note. Now, obviously it isn’t too difficult to just start from say G and just say G, A, B, C, D, E, F and G again…analyze it according to how the whole step and half step intervals would be laid out. We know of course how to tune each guitar string to the one before it to tune the guitar. So if the 5th fret if the low E string is an A note just as the next string is open, then we know that if we move each string up one fret (6th fret on the E string and 1st fret on the A string), then we will have Bb…and so on. FIGURE 13
Notice in figure 13 we got a section of the fret board starting at the 7th fret. Here we just have notes from the C major scale starting at C on the 8th fret of the low E string. Now instead of going from C to D to E and so on, all on the same string, we can play from C to D on the low E string and then instead of playing up to E on the low E, we move down to the E on the 7th fret of the second string…we want to move vertically on the fret board instead of just horizontally on one string so that we can access more notes from just that one position (place on the fret board). You can continue playing on down the strings just playing as follows on the left side of the dividing line shown in figure 13…until you get to the C note on the 8th fret of the high E string. You’ll notice that you pass by another C note halfway through on the 10th fret of the D (3rd) string. That middle C note is the end of the first of two octaves shown here and the beginning of the second of the two octaves. Notice all of the notes in this pattern are played on just 4 frets (7th through 10th). You have four fingers to play with, so place each finger above its corresponding fret starting with your index finger just above the 7th fret. Of course the first note of the scale is C which is on the 8th fret, so you start the scale with your second finger…the next note is D on the 10th fret, so you would play that one with your pinkie and so on. You can take any song in the key of C major or A minor and play this pattern according to which fingers it would be played with…we would say that the 1st finger would be your index finger, the 2nd finger would be your middle finger, the 3rd finger would be your ring finger and the 4th finger would be your pinkie, so the diagram would look like this is figure 14: FIGURE 14
Now that should give you an idea of how to position your fingers. This is just one mode of 7. There are 7 notes in a scale before it repeats and there is a mode for each note in the scale, so there are 7 modes…this is just the mode that starts with the first note in a key…in this case the key of C (Major). Some of the modes have notes that lie outside of just a 4 fret span, in these cases, you will have to stretch your index finger down 1 fret or your pinkie up 1 fret, depending on the mode you are playing. If we were to take the same mode that is described in figure 14 and map it out on the strings in terms of which frets were being played, it would look like figure 15. FIGURE 15
Now that you see the first mode, you need to know the name of it. It is called Ionian mode. The names of the seven modes go as follows:
Notice that Aolian is the 6th mode. Aolian is the C major scale played from the 6th note of the C major scale which would be an A note. So A minor can also be referred to as the Aolian mode of C major. The second note of C major is D of course. So if we play C major notes starting from the second note…D…then we are playing the Dorian or second mode of C…just as E (the third note of C) would be a Phrygian or third mode of C major…and this continues all the way to B which is the seventh note of C major…which would begin Locrian, the seventh and final mode. Figure 16 shows the patterns for all seven modes. Notice the notes of each mode tie into the notes of the modes before and after it. FIGURE 16
Start each mode with your second or middle finger except for the last one…Locrian. Start Locrian with your third finger…this will ensure that you are playing each mode as efficiently as possible. Remember that these are just standards. A mode has really nothing to do with the patterns that we are playing them in. The mode simply refers to which note of a scale we are starting out on. So technically you can play say the Phrygian mode of C major starting on the E note and just play all of the following notes on the same string and it would still be Phrygian. Playing the different patterns shown in the previous diagram simply makes it east to play solos and melodies from the same key all over the fret board. So once you learn all these 7 modal patterns and how they relate to each other one after another on the fret board, you’ll have a much greater understanding of guitar. This is how some of your favorite guitarists make some of your favorite guitar solos and melodies effortlessly…just by playing with different patterns in the same key. We just discussed modes for the key of C major. The pattern is the important part of it. So now that you can play C major all over the guitar, you can move the whole pattern up just one fret and you will be playing in the key of C# major…which is also referred to Bb minor. If you don’t understand some of the things we’ve just covered…read it again. If you want to know more than the average musician you’ll read it over until you understand it. |
