The Trouble with Traditional Approaches
After many years of playing and teaching music professionally, we feel it’s safe to say that the last thing most guitarists want is one more book/CD that explains the modes in the traditional manner. While it is not our in-tent to devalue traditional approaches—and we do retain the original Greek names for the modes because that’s how people refer to them in the music world—we believe that the way the modes are taught is confusing and hard to apply in a practical musical situation.
Here’s why:
Students typically learn modes in a sequence as part of a family, e.g. , C Ionian, D Dorian, E Phrygian, etc. The problem with this is that each mode sounds similar to the previous one because they’re all derived from the same key. C Ionian doesn’t sound very different from D Dorian. It’s like looking at different shades of the same color. But the truth is that each mode is unique sounding, and this concept can easily be lost when they are learned in this manner.
Guitarists are often taught modes in the form of patterns on the fret board, but this unfortunately leaves them without much more than finger patterns and very little knowledge of how to apply the modes in a musical context. True modal mastery is not about shapes and patterns, but about understanding how the mode is constructed and how it can be used.
Guitarists who understand the modes possess one of the keys to making interesting, harmonically rich music. And now you can do the same.
