The Seven Modes

What this section teaches

Take the seven notes of one major scale and treat each of them, in turn, as home. Same notes, seven different homes — seven modes, each with its own emotional weather. Two of them you already know: Ionian is the major scale itself, and Aeolian is the natural minor. The other five live between and beyond them, from Lydian's floating brightness to Phrygian's dark glower, and they are the vocabulary behind an enormous amount of film music, jazz, folk, and rock that plain major and minor can't explain.

How to use these pages

Each mode's page describes its character, gives its step pattern and example spelling, lays out its diatonic chords, and lists the characteristic progressions that make the mode audible — because a mode only sounds like itself when the harmony insists on its home note. The fastest way in is comparative: read Dorian against natural minor (one raised sixth) or Mixolydian against major (one lowered seventh), and let the single changed note explain the whole mood shift.

Where to go next

Modes are rotations of material covered in scales, and their harmony borrows machinery from keys. To hear modal color inside otherwise-major songs, read the borrowed chords guide — modal interchange is the modes leaking into everyday harmony.