Musical Definitions

What is a mode?

Before we understand what a mode is, we have to understand what a scale is. “Scale” is defined by the Merriam Webster dictionary as “a graduated series of musical tones ascending or descending in order of pitch according to a specified scheme of their intervals”

Simplified: A scale is a specific group of notes that creates a harmonic picture. That picture can be described as “happy” or “sad” or “blue” or “silly”… but what’s important is the specific notes involved, and how they SOUND, particularly to you.

How many notes are in a scale?

That depends on the scale itself. The pentatonic scale has five notes, before it starts repeating itself (penta meaning 5, tonic meaning tone… penta-tonic…) Some scales have 6, some have 7, and some even have 8.

For the sake of convenience, and for easy memorization, we’re going to use the C Major scale for our examples. Anyone who has memorized their alphabet, can memorize the C Major scale. It is (spotlight, please) “A B C D E F G” … but yeah, there’s a catch… we’re going to put it in this order: “C D E F G A B.” Do you think you can handle that? I thought so.

The scale is made up of a set of intervals, and those intervals create the harmony or color of the scale or mode.

What is an interval?

An interval, in music, is the distance between 2 notes. On the guitar, you can think of it as “frets.” If you’re simply ascending the C Major scale, for example, you’d start on C (3^rd fret of the A string, for example) and the first interval would be a whole step (in this case, sometimes called a “major 2^nd”). A whole step is 2 frets, and a half step is, obviously, 1 fret. That puts our second note on the 5^th fret of the A string. And so on, and so on.

The intervals that make up a C Major scale are:

C (whole step) D (whole step) E (half step) F (whole step) G (whole step) A (whole step) B (half step) and then we’re back to C, where it all starts over again.

Now imagine, if you will, that this group of whole steps and half steps is in a fixed order, like the numbers on your watch (if you wear a digital watch, I guess I just can’t really help you, and you’ll probably be better off finding a different career or hobby). You can turn your watch upside down, but the numbers are always in the same order. So for example, with the C Major scale, we can take it and say “D E F G A B C” or “F G A B C D E” but as long as we still have those same 7 notes, we’re still dealing with the “C Major scale” in one form or another, and nothing we can do will change the interval relationship. In laymen’s terms, the interval between C and D will always be a whole step, and the interval between E and F will always be a half step.

I hope you like it.