Theory questions too small for their own thread

[Hollowway]

[General info - my apologies if it’s too basic but honestly it’s the key to learning guitar theory IMO.]

Modes are all about the underlying chord progression and the target tones. That’s what makes it sound and feel a certain way. Modes without chords or drones are just scales.

Think of it this way. All 7 modes are the exact same notes. So why does it sound different? Because playing the C major scale from C to C and landing on C sounds major. But play that same scale A to A over an A minor chord and it will sound sad. Same exact notes. (You can also play over the C and it will still work, but ideally your progression should have an Am as the i chord)

It’s honestly all about those intervals and how they interact with the chord they’re played over.

I always say the best place to start is arpeggios. A lot of people start with Pentatonics which are 5 of the 7 notes of a scale. Arpeggios are even less - just the target tones of a scale. So a major arpeggio is just 1-3-5. And a minor is 1-b3-5. So you can’t go wrong! Place an arpeggio over a chord and no matter what note you pick to begin or end on is the right note lol. You learn the fretboard and you learn basic intervals. You learn target tones - the notes that sound best overall to land on, especially during chord changes. (Advanced primer - chord tones are why the greats sound great. They follow the changes. They nail the change either right before, during, or transition with. That’s what gives melody and solos movement.)

Start with mindless shred - up and down arpeggios or pentatonics. Work your way up to common phrases/lines. Try and sing melodies. Change up your note durations and dynamics.

Then you add one more note - 7ths. Major, minor, and dominant. Then once you add a 4th (not a great note to end on but a good passing tone) you have 1-3-4-5-7. Guess what that is? The major pentatonic. Or 1-b3-4-5-7 which is the minor.

You know the basic major (Ionian) and basic minor (aeolian). Getting the other two major modes is done when you add/swap missing notes. A #4 added to a major arpeggio or pentatonic (instead of the 4th) tells the ear its Lydian. Stick with the regular 4 (or skip) but flat your 7th and you get Mixolydian. It’s that flat 7th that tells your ear it’s not regular major scale. You could just play 1-3-5-b7. So you’re only adding one note to your basic major arpeggio.

Minor is the same. Basic arpeggio or pentatonic of 1-b3-(4)-5-(7). The 2 and b6 tell the war it’s definitely Aeolian. A 2 but a 6 tells the ear its Dorian. The 6th here is really the key note. A b2 and a b6 and you’ll hear Phrygian.

Fuck Locrian. Nobody likes that guy.

A trick I picked up from a Marty Friedman and Josh Smith (the other one) is once you’ve gotten this far - stop landing on the 1/3/5 target tones all the time. At first you use the outside notes as blue notes. But now you start to begin and end lines on the 2 or 6. That will really sell modes to the listener.

And remember the importance of chords, drones, or pedal tones.

I hope this wasn’t too basic but honestly master this and you’re 90% there. Otherwise, just play really fast because then individual note selection won’t matter as much lol.

Thanks. That’s what threw me, though. When switching it from minor to major, he completely changed the progression. So, are you saying that he changed the progression to make it suit an Ionian mode progression? I don’t know enough about the modes to understand how they would influence the progressions. In other words, would you not expect to keep the same progression when switching modes? I’m assuming that if you had, say, an authentic cadence in F# major, then you’d keep the same five to one progression when you switched it to a minor key. (But flatten or sharp any notes needed for the new key.). I just don’t understand why he rewrote the whole chord progression. To me, that’s going to drastically influence the sound of the song, and isn’t really allowing you to hear the difference between major and minor.

 

[tedtan]

Thanks. That’s what threw me, though. When switching it from minor to major, he completely changed the progression. So, are you saying that he changed the progression to make it suit an Ionian mode progression? I don’t know enough about the modes to understand how they would influence the progressions. In other words, would you not expect to keep the same progression when switching modes? I’m assuming that if you had, say, an authentic cadence in F# major, then you’d keep the same five to one progression when you switched it to a minor key. (But flatten or sharp any notes needed for the new key.). I just don’t understand why he rewrote the whole chord progression. To me, that’s going to drastically influence the sound of the song, and isn’t really allowing you to hear the difference between major and minor.

In short, yes. The chords need to play nicely with the scale and vice versa, and, in fact, the chords are actually built from the scale/mode. This means that the chords need to be changed when switching between different scales. You want to identify how that scale mode differs from the major or minor scale and use chords that contain those different notes in order to emphasize it’s unique qualities.

You mention an authentic cadence, which is a V-I (major V chord to major I chord) sequence used at the end of a chord progression to return to the I chord (the key of the song) in a major key.* Those major chords, especially the major I chord, make the cadence/progression a major key progression. If you were to do this in a minor key, you would need to change the I (major) chord to a i (minor) chord to fit the minor scale/key.

So yes, you change the chords used to emphasize the scale/mode you are using


* Technically it is possible to see an authentic cadence (major V-I chord progression) in a minor key, but only as the last chords of the song/composition (or the last chords of a section/movement of the song). Using the harmonic minor scale (instead of the natural minor) gives you the major V chord and, less commonly used, you can end a section on a major chord built on the same root note as the tonic minor chord (e.g., an E major chord rather than an E minor chord in the key of E minor) to end on a more uplifting note. This is called using a “Picardy third” and is sometimes seen in Baroque era classical music (and maybe some prog rock), but it is not something you’ll see very often.

 

[gnoll]

Thanks. That’s what threw me, though. When switching it from minor to major, he completely changed the progression. So, are you saying that he changed the progression to make it suit an Ionian mode progression? I don’t know enough about the modes to understand how they would influence the progressions. In other words, would you not expect to keep the same progression when switching modes? I’m assuming that if you had, say, an authentic cadence in F# major, then you’d keep the same five to one progression when you switched it to a minor key. (But flatten or sharp any notes needed for the new key.). I just don’t understand why he rewrote the whole chord progression. To me, that’s going to drastically influence the sound of the song, and isn’t really allowing you to hear the difference between major and minor.

So basically you would have wanted him to use the same roman numerals in the same places?

So for example a I>IV>V would become i>iv>v in Aeolian?

But this can become pretty strange for the different modes. A bunch of diminished triads are gonna show up in the progressions and there's no guarantee that the I chord is actually gonna feel like the tonic. It might just end up sounding like normal major or minor but with the chords in different places.

Typically to imply modal flavor you want to use fewer chords and you want to lean into the tonic chords pretty heavily and maybe use pedal tones, otherwise the modal flavor is easily lost.

 

[Hollowway]

So basically you would have wanted him to use the same roman numerals in the same places?

So for example a I>IV>V would become i>iv>v in Aeolian?

But this can become pretty strange for the different modes. A bunch of diminished triads are gonna show up in the progressions and there's no guarantee that the I chord is actually gonna feel like the tonic. It might just end up sounding like normal major or minor but with the chords in different places.

Typically to imply modal flavor you want to use fewer chords and you want to lean into the tonic chords pretty heavily and maybe use pedal tones, otherwise the modal flavor is easily lost.

Sort of. What I mean is that he claims that the song sounds different if it’s major or minor, but glosses over the fact that he completely changed the progression. You can change the feel of a song by keeping the same melody, same mode, and just changing the actual chords. So unless there’s a rationale for how you’d change the particular minor progression to this particular progression, I’d say the whole thing is dumb. I know how progressions and chords are built. But it seems like he just picked some chords that sounded good under the melody when he made it major, and then talked about how it sounded different major. I think if you took different chords under the original key, and then listened to it, it would still sound different. In other words, unless I’m missing something (for instance, that changing from this minor progression to major would ALWAYS result in the progression he used) he’s glossing over a pretty big variable here. Namely that he’s just assigning a whole new progression, and saying the song sounds different as a major key.

 

[Hollowway]

So, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the theory behind chord progressions, and trying to make sense out of the ones that pop up in songs. I understand how voice leading works, circle progressions, and some of the other basics. But I’m stuck on this:

In Sweet Child o’ Mine, the chord progression for the main solo is Em, C, B7, Am. So that’s i, VI, V7, iv. But I don’t understand this progression, because the V7 wants to pull to the tonic. It would make way more sense to use the more traditional i, bVI, iv, V7. In just playing the chords, the V7 to iv, followed by i, just doesn’t sound like it’s moving along. But that’s the progression. Am I missing a theory thing here, as to why that progression is in there? I figure the iv to I is a plagal cadence, so that’s not terribly unusual. But the V7 to iv so weird, and just doesn’t have as much voice leading resolution there.

 

[tedtan]

V-IV-I (even as dominant sevenths, V7-IV7-I7) is a common blues turnaround, so it’s probably just influenced by that. Plus, those guys weren’t theory nerds when they wrote that, they were wanna be rock stars high on heroin, so who knows what their thought process was.

 

[Hollowway]

V-IV-I (even as dominant sevenths, V7-IV7-I7) is a common blues turnaround, so it’s probably just influenced by that. Plus, those guys weren’t theory nerds when they wrote that, they were wanna be rock stars high on heroin, so who knows what their thought process was.

Ah, I didn’t realize V IV I was common.
And yeah, true about them and theory. I just say it because a lot of times when something sounds good, it can be explained in some way by the theory. But the V IV I seemed weird to me.

 

[gnoll]

V7-i can often sound pretty old and cheesy because the resolution sounds kind of obvious and on-the-nose. It's typically reminiscent of classical music or something. That can be great but it's got a certain sound to it. You can say it "makes sense" but if the band isn't going for that sound then it doesn't make sense at all. And I gotta say, if people writing music always went for the things that made the most sense then music would be really really boring. Things that are a bit unexpected or unusual often make the music more interesting.

Also, just looking at the progression... It looks like the bass walks down the scale 6-5-4 before going back to 1. That might give it a bit of cohesion and make it "feel more like it makes sense".