This Is Why MODES Are So Confusing

Hi @mem, I’m sorry that my use of those terms was confusing, and I’m very sorry that it took me so long to see this comment. For a time I purposely avoided commenting on the forum because I wanted students to have a place where they could express themselves freely and come to their own conclusions about the musical issues they care about. But now I think that it was a mistake for me not to support the great conversations that have been started here, and going forward I’ll be participating much more actively in these conversations.

There have already been some great responses to your question. But let me just go right to the very specific question your’e asking about what I mean by those words. The difference is just whether you’re visualizing the sounds relative to the root of the chord (modal view) or relative to the overall key of the music (tonal view) as @Jelske and @hender99 explained.

The simplest way to experience this difference is to just draw a picture of any particular chord in these two different ways. For example, here is a drawing of the 2- chord first in the modal view and then in the tonal view:

2- chord modal vs. tonal

When we begin studying chord notes in IFR Exercise 3: Pure Harmony, our very first exercise is called Seven Worlds Expanded. And we start this exercise by studying the chords in the modal view that you see on the left side of the drawing that I linked above. Since we’re studying the chords individually at this point, this is the most natural way for most people to picture the notes because you have the root of the chord at the top and bottom of your range.

But then once you’ve gotten comfortable with this, and you understand for example that the notes of the 2- chord are 2, 4, 6 and 1, then you can also practice visualizing these notes in the tonal octave as shown on the right side of the drawing that I linked above. Where this vision becomes very useful is when we begin combining these chords into progressions, because it allows us to see how all of the chord notes are connected through our Melody Paths exercise. More generally, it’s just an exercise in understanding where these chord notes actually “live” within the key of the music.

Does this answer your question? I think that if you start with these definitions in mind and then you go back and re-read the section on Seven Worlds Expanded from IFR Exercise 3: Pure Harmony, it will make a lot more sense this time. Please let me know if you have any more doubts about it and I promise it won’t take me 4 months to respond this time. :slight_smile:

But here’s one final word of advice. Mastering these words “tonal” and “modal” doesn’t have any importance at all. What matters is for you to be able to picture the notes of the 2- chord on your instrument, and for you to explore the second harmonic environment creatively in your improv practice. In fact, I’m not even using these words “tonal” and “modal” to describe anything important about the music at all. I’m just using them to describe an exercise. And all I’m proposing is that you practice visualizing the notes of your 2- chord in the two different ways I showed in the drawing linked above. If you can do that, then it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference whether you remember which one of those drawings was called “modal” and which one was called “tonal”. As you gain more experience with all of this, you’ll probably find that this vocabulary starts to make sense and you can remember it easily. But please don’t spend any time or energy on learning those words! They’re just my attempt to describe these two different ranges, and the words themselves have no importance whatsoever. I’m sorry that this was confusing and I appreciate your asking the question. I hope that helps!

David

Thanks David, yes I’m realizing that it’s more important to hear and experience these concepts, rather than understanding them intellectually. But it’s easy to get hung up on the terminology when your reading about it.

I’m currently going a bit deeper into Exercise 2: Melody, so am I right in thinking that tonal and modal only make sense when there are changing, underlying harmonies (ie chords) and if I’m jamming using the Seven Worlds jam tracks, so within a single harmonic environment, then I’m in a modal view.

Hi @mem, that’s a great way to think about it for now. This distinction of tonal vs. modal actually comes up in many different areas of our music practice, but here’s the simplest way I can describe what we mean by this difference:

tonal = relative to the overall key of the music
modal = relative to the tonal center of the moment

In your Seven Worlds practice with our jam tracks, you could actually focus on either one of these things. So it’s not exactly true what you said about this distinction only applying to chord changes. But this distinction is trivial at this point. You’re quite right to think of the modal view as the one you’re studying in Exercise 2, and that the tonal view will become primary when we get to Exercise 3 and we begin visualizing multiple chords on a single map.

And again, don’t let any of this distract you from the much more important work you’re doing in getting to know the sounds and learning to tell your own musical stories with them. Both “tonal” and “modal” are merely describing different points of view. So once you’ve gained sufficient experience with all of these sounds, you won’t even make a distinction between the two points of view because you’ll be seeing them both as part of a single reality.

Thanks for asking the question. I’m sure lots of other people were just as confused by my occasional use of these terms, so it’s great to talk about these things here.

David

Not sure where on the forum I should ask my question . I’m new, having recently purchased IFR main course. I’m 68 and an advanced beginner and thought the course sounded good. Now that I’ve got it, it seems overwhelming. Will I ever recognize the environment I’m hearing, let alone the key? Where should I start focusing my attention? Is there a most simple way?
Thanks for any help.
Rick

Welcome @rickman777
My best advice is to take it slow, steady & deep. If you start to feel out of your depth, cycle back. Whatever materials you have (I’m not clear what you mean by the ‘main course’ - maybe the book?), don’t consider them them things to be got through, ticked & moved on from. Even the most basic things continue to be useful.
For me, starting around 3 years ago a little before I was 60, unable to sing (I was labelled ‘tone deaf’ at an early age) & not playing any instrument the Sing the Numbers materials have &continue to be the core of my development. Having got started with my voice, I tried learning an instrument too. The ‘Seven Worlds’ backing tracks were a great aid as something to explore the environments with (I was using one earlier to day in my practice, still).
When you are ready, there are other sets of backing tracks, following the stages that the IFR book goes through.
3 years later I’m still a beginner, but not so much a beginner as I was. I believe that’s a good mindset to have and a good thing to be (I have a book on my shelf called ‘The Perpetual Beginner’!) . All along I’ve tried to relax & have fun (even though I think that progressing in ear training is the toughest task I’ve ever set myself).

Gradually, progress is made, sometimes imperceptibly, sometime in a step change as something ‘gels’.

All the materials, even the most basic continue to be relevant and are still worth revisiting.

I hope I have years of study & development ahead. For me that’s an exciting prospect & project. I hope you feel that way too.

Hi Rick,

I would suggest that you take it slowly as David suggests in the book. While doing the initial exercises under exercise 1 and 2, also invest in “Sing the Numbers.” For me, and several others, Sing the Numbers is what gave the program the most value and gave me the most progress.

There are quite a few people in the forum that will help you and give very good suggestions including David Reed @ImproviseForReal and @DavidW.

With a little patience, you will gain a lot from IFR. I am 66, and started with it 2 years ago, and it has transformed my playing, and has molded me into an intuitive musician.

Woody

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+1 to what DavidW says. IFR is unlike any other music program you buy because you don’t hurry up and complete this lesson and hurry on to the next. IFR proposes you slowly immerse yourself in the lessons, doing them for fun and not as a rung on a ladder. It’s like learning to be a native speaker of Mandarin… it takes time and playful immersion. After a while, it will all click in your mind. The amount of time varies for all of us…

I also agree to sing the numbers is the best way to have the most fun and bang for the buck.

Over the last 2 years I’ve read David Reed’s IFR book 4 time, and have made a careful outline of it all. At 71 years old that’s the kind of thing it’s takes for me.

@rickman777 Probably obvious but I’ll just add that the one time to move before you feel are comfortable with something is if it you are somehow getting bored with it or not making the progress you feel you should to such an extent that it’s become tiresome or a drag. In that sitiuation remember the ‘fun’ bit, and apply the fact that the are a million ways to approach this music thing, so switch to some other aspect (there are plenty to go at) for at least a while & get the fun back in your journey. When you come back to the original thing later on you’ll have more experience & may well find that what ever the log jam was it’s not the issue it used to be?

Similarly while it’s good to go at things steadily & gradually from the basics up, if you happen to get an enthusiasm for something that’s further along & want to give it a go, feel free. Enjoy yourself. It’s good for you. It’s good for your development.

There are no hard & fast rules. There is no ‘One True Way’, except forward. :smiley:

This is Shelley, @woodyhaiken’s wife. I’ve been playing guitar since I was 8 years old and always thought in terms of chords (with occasional bass runs and easy transitional phrases). I was never taught music theory until Woody started getting into it as part of his sax training. I never even understood the concept of chord numbers - you had the major chord, the lower chord (the 4th) and the upper chord (the 5th). And then there was the main minor chord (the relative minor or the 6th) and the secondary minor chord (dorian minor or 2nd). This is how my brain identified chords in a progression until the past few years when I started delving deeper into music theory.

As Woody said, I am a really good rhythm guitar player. I’ve been called a human metronome because my tempo is so spot on.

I can play the guitar in just about any key (thanks to the capo), so I pick the key in which I can best sing and easily hit the highest and lowest notes. And yes, most of our progressions are predictable and easy to internalize, we also have quite a few songs in our repertoire with unusual chord progressions - those are the most fun for me.

I just recently started David’s @ImproviseForReal Chord Melody Guitar 1 and it is challenging my brain to think of the notes in a chord in a totally different way.

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Hi Shelly. Nice to meet you. :slight_smile:

Great course, I did it a couple of years ago, probably before I was really ready for it in terms of instrument technique (I’d only picked up guitar about 6 months earlier), but nonetheless I got a great deal out of it. I’ve just started a second pass through the materals.

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Nice to meet you as well David.

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Welcome @rickman777! The most important thing is to not overwhelm yourself with questions right now. I can understand your disbelief that you could ever recognize all of those different harmonic environments and keys, but that’s not how it works at all. The only thing you need to focus on right now is getting to know the SOUNDS. By that I mean the individual notes that you’re improvising with at any given moment. These are the musical lessons we’re trying to learn from Seven Worlds. It’s not about learning to recognize those harmonic environments in the music all around you. It’s about learning the lessons of MELODY.

If learning to understand music by ear is something you are especially passionate about, at some point in the future you can do our video courses Ear Training for Musical Creativity and Recognizing Chords by Ear. But first I encourage you to just relax and spend some time improvising over the IFR Jam Tracks. Focus on finding your own voice, and most importantly finding your own pleasure in improvising.

To help you let go of your worry about recognizing the harmonic environments by ear, let me just give you a preview of how that’s actually going to work. The first thing you need to know is that almost all popular songs spend all their time alternating between the 1st and 6th harmonic environments. The first harmonic environment is what we call “major” and the 6th harmonic environment is what we call “minor”. So your challenge of “recognizing the harmonic environment” gets reduced to the much less intimidating task of simply recognizing major vs. minor.

Your other challenge of recognizing the key doesn’t even exist. That’s not what we’re trying to do at all. When you listen to a song that you want to understand by ear, it doesn’t even matter what key it’s in. That’s not what you’re listening for. What you’re listening for are the familiar sounds of notes and chords that you know from your IFR practice. So let’s imagine that you’ve been listening to a song for a minute and you recognize the chords to be the 1 chord, the 2 chord, the 5 chord and the 6 chord. You still don’t know what key it’s in, but that problem gets solved the moment you start your solo.

Now let’s imagine that it’s your turn to solo. In 99% of real world situations, you can just ask the other musicians what chords they’re playing. So you almost never have to find the key of the music by ear unless you want to. But let’s imagine that you want to figure out the key by ear. Maybe you’re playing along with the radio so there’s nobody to ask for the chords. So here’s how we find the key of the music by ear. We play just one single note on our instrument. That’s it. Any note you play is guaranteed to be one of the 12 possible notes relative to the key of the music. And through your Seven Worlds practice, you’ll eventually get to know all of these sounds. So no matter what note you play, you’ll be instantly oriented in the key of the music.

If that’s still not clear or it’s hard to imagine yourself doing this, that’s fine. We’re getting WAY ahead of ourselves. But what I hope you can take away from that brief vignette is the idea that KNOWING THE SOUNDS is what ultimately enables us to find the key of the music instantly. That’s why I say that right now, you shouldn’t have a care in the world! All you need to do is start improvising using IFR Jam Tracks Levels 1 & 2, and just enjoy yourself. Listen deeply to the sound of each note you play, and use your imagination to decide where to go next. Obviously there’s other technical learning that you’ll be picking up as you work through the book, and there are lots of specific exercises that you can practice with the jam tracks to develop different aspects of your skill. But the most essential learning through all of this is just getting to know the unique and beautiful sound of each note of our musical system. So instead of worrying about mastering all of the different harmonic environments, think of the much simpler goal of getting to know the seven notes of our musical system. The different harmonic environments will illustrate different facets of these notes. But you don’t have to keep a mental catalog of all of these possibilities. Just keep mixing it up, exploring the different harmonic environments to keep things fresh, and keep learning about the melodic possibilities of those seven notes. That would be a perfect focus for you right now.

David

Hi @ShelleyHaiken, welcome to the forum! Your reputation as a great guitar player precedes you. :slight_smile: @woodyhaiken has told us a little bit about your musical experiences together. It sounds wonderful and I’m happy that you have this lovely musical connection.

I hope you enjoy the chord melody course! At first it might not be obvious how that practice could eventually merge with your current guitar style, so my advice is to just allow these two practices to coexist for now. It takes time to develop your chord melody mastery to a level where you can bring that ability to your guitar songs. But you have a great advantage in playing lots of songs with very simple chord progressions, because those are the very best place to learn. (One of the biggest things that prevents musicians from understanding harmony is just that they’re playing songs that are too abstract for them to notice the underlying logic. So ironically, playing very simple songs is actually the fastest path to mastery because it really accelerates your learning to have everything laid out for you in a very clear way.)

So I hope you enjoy the course and I wanted to offer my help if you ever have questions about how to bring your new chord melody skills into your existing guitar projects. I hope you’ll continue to be part of our conversation here, and I wish you much success and happiness in your journey!

David

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Thank very much for this in depth response. I did need to hear that. I do want to be able to appreciate every note and find beauty. I will try to trust that this method works and just be patient. Others on the forum have also responded with encouragement and wisdom. This seems to be a very healthy group of people who love music and want to help others.
Rick

@rickman777 I’ll just add a little extra to that if I may? It’s a thing that I find very handy as I gradually find my way towards that ‘eventually get to know all of these sounds’.

As David (@ImproviseForReal ) explained, you know the note you chose is one of the 12 notes.

Listen to the sound of the note you played in the context of the music. If the note sounded a little out of place in that context, a high consideration for your next note might be just half a tone up or down.

Part of the beauty of the tonal map is that if you happen to start on a note that’s not in the key, then making that move half a tone up or down will land you on a key tone. If that doesn’t make immediate sense, try drawing out the map

1.2.34.5.6.71

As you can see, the dots ‘.’ (i.e. notes outside the key) are each surrounded by key notes.

So, perhaps ironically, if your first choice of note happens to be out of the key you are in a way ahead of the game because it means you already know two that are in the key. :smiley:

You might then hang out with that initial note (or two) for a little while (it’s amazing how much music you can make with just one or two notes), then use that experience & your ‘feel’, to choose where to go next. If when you make your choice the new note feels out of context, remember that tonal map & either skip back onto the ground you know, or make that extra half tone step into a newly found note of the key.

I hope that makes sense & helps.

Edit to add: Of course, if you feel you happen to like that ‘out of context’ note, you’re free to make use of it. No rules… :wink:

Wouldn’t it be confusing if the music you were listening to was in a certain key and the the song had a different tonal center?

@rickman777 I’m not 100% sure which post you are replying to, but if it was my ‘move half a tone from a non-key tone to find a key tone’, then the tonal centre doesn’t make any difference to the logic I described.

Say you are listeing to a song that happens to be in what classic music theory terms a minor key. To IFR that’s environment 6, so if we were to write out a tonal map with that knowledge it would be

6.71.2.34.5.6

Each dot (.) still has a key tone on each side. It’s just the same with any other environment (or mode), e.g. environment 2 (Dorian in the classic terminology)

2.34.5.6.71.2

Identifying the tonal centre isn’t actually necessary in order to find the notes that are in the key. Identifying the role (i.e. number) of the tones you find, and in due course which of those is the tonal centre are things that will come with time & experience. In the meantime, not knowing isn’t a barrier to having fun playing along.

A good place to try this sort of thing out is using the IFR Jam tracks. Ways to play the tracks without seeing the name of the key have been discussed in various places over time. I list a few ideas in this post. @michael has written an App to help, see this Topic.

Maybe you were replying to some other post? If so I hope my comment still helps, either you or maybe someone else.

I think the key point is that after you practice for some time, you can recognize the notes of the major scale immediately. The same way you recognize blue or red. Then if you play some note against music that’s already going on (the harmonic environment) you will be able to say something like “that’s not 5”. Then if you know your instrument, you’re in good shape because if you’re playing note 5 you immediately know where all the rest of the tonal notes are.

All it takes is slow disciplined practice. I’m still working my own way there

It’s a work in progress for me too! :wink:

PS. And remember you don’t always have to use jam tracks ‘blind’. I used them with full prior knowledge of the key for ages before I started using them ‘blind’. I still don’t always use them ‘blind’.

David, @ImproviseForReal, thank you for your comments. And thank you for clarifying how the chord melody course will eventually lead to using chord melodies in my existing projects. I appreciate your offer of help. I look forward to continuing along the learning path with you.

Shelley

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