I have a student who'd been struggling for a while with understanding how to really work with modes. It's one thing to understand the fingerings, but it's a different matter entirely when you start trying to use them musically with other structures. He had a really solid grasp on pentatonic scales and major scales and we'd spent a lot of time working on arpeggios. He also understood what the modes are all about. The material was all working just great inside his noggin, but these different ideas wanted to stay different ideas, especially when it came to modes and applying them to playing over a blues.
What we came up with was a sort of flow chart that illustrates the development from the simple idea of octaves through pentatonic scales and arpeggios to the mode. In this example, I chose to use mixolydian.
To analyze these charts, we start with R. From that, we generate two more complex patterns - an arpeggio (R 3 5 b7) and a major pentatonic scale (R 2 3 5 6). We then put these two shapes together into a kind of hybrid (R 2 3 5 6 b7). At this point, there's only one note missing to make the full mode! We add the 4th, and we've got a full mixolydian scale.
This approach will work for any of the natural modes except for locrian since it has a b5 and the pentatonic scale won't really work in that context. It'll even work for a bunch of synthetic modes like lydian dominant!
Brant Grieshaber - guitarist
Guitar Teacher
Skype Guitar Lessons
