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KORG Gadget - Why modes instead of scales?
When I click on the SCALE button in the app, it offers a choice of Greek words, which I understand are afaik called modes (as of modalities of a particular scale). Why? Could someone with a better grasp of music theory explain this UX choice of Korg software engineers?
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Modes are scales. Mode is just a term for a certain set of scales that are called by those Greek names. A few have other names (Ionian = Major, Aeolian = Minor, etc.). I guess it’s these that bother you?
I dunno. It has never bothered me or occurred to me to question it. I wouldn’t know what else to call a Phrygian or Locrian scale.
I think of those as the Flamenco scale, and the avoid-at-all-costs scale
There is a little more to it than that. Modes are scales derived from the same underlying scale by shifting/rotating the series of intervals. The modes with greek names are modes of major scale. There are modes of other scales. For instance, there are modes of the melodic and harmonic minor scales, too...which are important in jazz.
@bbelo : Gadget provides other scales besides the modes of the major scale. A Google search will provide you many articles about the usefulness of these modes. They each have their own character.
For one thing, it’s so you can play in modal tonalities with the root as the first note on the (on-screen) keyboard. All the while not hitting any out of key notes.
😂
What underlying scale are the modes in Gadget derived from? Major, minor?
I found this feature immensely useful. Depending on the mood of the song I was writing I’d pick the silliest word, or the most strident sounding word, or the passive-soundingest word, given this selection of arbitrary and abstract and otherwise meaningless words. Otherwise one is at the mercy of the naming scheme given by gadget, which may not match the intended mood of the song. I don’t think the scales actually make any difference to how the synths actually respond at all, it’s more a placeholder for an abstract word.
The greeks had these Harps with fixed pitch strings. You could emphasize a "root" tone and get happy, sad, mediterranean, moorish and heavy metal melodies out if it by droning a root tone.
You can get the experience by limiting yourself to the white keys on a MIDI controller or screen keyboard.
Memorize the names using this mnemonic:
I'm Dejected Please Leave Me All Lonely.
Ionian - C to C "Happy" Major
Dorian - D to D "A little blue today, Miles"
Phrygian E to E "Bull Fighter, Flamenco" Em to F Major and back
Lydian - F to F "Like Major but unable to play a V7 chord" perfect for floating jazz
Mixolydian - G to G the root is a 7th chord and you can do the 7 to 1 metal riff (on a harp)
*note Harmonica players use these mode relationships to add these extra colors
Aeolian -A to A "sad" (relative) Minor like your sisters kid
Locrian - B to B composers take it as a challenge to make that B a root. Fucking hard.
Additional Scales start to deviate from white keys only like the Blues which integrates the black keys.
Did you know that pure black keys is the pentatonic scale which exists in most cultures but dominates in asia. It also has a happy and sad roots:
F#/Gb to F#/Gb is the happy one outlining a F#/Gb 6+2 major chord
D#/Eb to D#/Eb is sad outlining a D#/Eb minor 7+11
Brilliant! 👌
I recommend looking up those modes. They are the modes of the major scale (also called Ionian mode). What you probably mean by the minor scale (natural minor) is a mode of the major scale, too.
There isn’t anything odd about Gadget including these. It is pretty common for apps to include them.
The modes with Greek names are all different rotations of the Major scale, as described in detail by @McD.
We also used to call these “Church Modes” (modes of the major scale).
Also, the 7 church modes were measured from light, to darkness.
But not many useful articles 😆 For some reason a lot of online explanations of scales are needlessly abstruse. Wikipedia on music theory is the worst, half the articles are in jargon that links to other pages that fail to explain anything … i suspect its a case of ‘if you can’t explain it simply you probably don’t understand it yourself’ 😝
That’s exactly what I’ve always found – the whole area of “music theory” is endless, pointless and nothing but gatekeeping for no real reason (as nobody makes any actual money from it). Years ago I decided to make my own scales or keys or strings or whatever the temporal groupings of frequencies are called this week. In effect, as far as I’m concerned, music theory is: make a sound, wait a bit, maybe make another sound that is tuned to either: the same frequency, a higher frequency, a lower frequency. Or maybe don’t make another sound, until you do. That’s it. That’s music theory for me. Total freedom to use whichever frequencies I want (not that I particularly want any specific frequency, they’re not the important part of music – the evolution of harmonic content within a sound is by far the important part). Hence, prodding a keyboard with a carrot is my preferred expression of musicianship – all the notes are basically the same.
I’m working with a piano teacher right now to film his online lesson videos. He wrote a 55 lesson jazz theory series that is awesome. We have filmed 13 lessons and should finish 6 more this week. I don’t know when it will be out but he did a really good job of explaining modes. I can see from what he’s teaching now though that looking at the modes in isolation really doesn’t explain it, nor does the approach of what scale to pay over what chord, because that just makes it that you’re memorizing tons of stuff. But as the building blocks of chords, how they work together, and why they work together is explained, you don’t need to think that way anymore because the choices of what you would play all make sense. “Functional harmony” as a term finally makes sense to me. I’ll let people here know when it is released if there’s interest.
But, I wish gadget would default to the chromatic scale with all 12 notes showing. It’s a creativity killer for me when I have to change that every time.
‘Custom’ would be nice, where you can just specify your own notes.
One problem with those scale funny words I found over the past couple of years was when I moved my Gadget songs over to Logic Pro X – which only has “major” and “minor”, which of course are completely unrelated to any of Gadget’s funny words. So I just selected each note as it came in over the MIDI file and shoved it around a bit, to make it different. It’s not exactly prodding the keyboard with a carrot, but the essence of prodding with a carrot is to use an abstraction to distance the result from any musicianship bias. Selecting all the notes of a same frequency and shoving it somewhere else is about the same sort of thing, and even gives the authentic ‘playing keyboard by hand’ result where you press the keyboard with a finger and two nearby notes are played together (because that’s what happens most of the time). The result was good, so I’m happy.
I understand now that modes (natural minor AKA minor scale as well) are all a derivation from the major scale. It's all odd to me because I don't undertand it. Thanks to you less so
Hello everybody! I thought I would make an account just to chime in here.
One way to look at modes is the intervals a mode gives you, e.g.
C Ionian : Major 3rd, minor 6th, perfect 5th;
D Dorian : minor third, major 6th, perfect 5th
B Locrian : minor third, minor 6th, diminished 5th
And so on. Of course, these are only words until you spend time memorising the sounds. The value of music theory is limiting the number of things you have to look at at any one time and being able to describe musical ideas via a text message without having to hum.
What if I set the "Scale Type" in Gadget to "Aeolian" and the "Key" to C? Is this still sad and minor? I tried it and it definitely sounded sad. How is the Aeolian Key A different to Aeolian Key C practically? They sound very similar to me.
I understood modes just fine before reading this, but you have given us the single most useful breakdown I’ve ever seen. Thank you!
It’s a similar difference to A major vs C major.
You would change the Key to make a tune easier to sing for your particular voice and you would choose a Mode to make it sound “happy “ or “sad”.
I'm reminded of the parable of the 7 modes and the elephant.
Yes! I’ve always thought music is like one of those optical illusions that look like an old lady sometimes and a pair of wineglasses another time.
How is Aeolian C and A different? They use different pitches. The relationship between the scale steps are the same but what pitches make them up is different.
Play an A minor chord and a C minor chord. They sound similar because of the relationship between the notes to each other and different because the actual notes are different pitches.
Have you ever noticed how some music theory shows chords in roman numerals?
Like I ii IV V?
The upper case are major chords and the lower case minor and they add a little circle for diminished (on the 7th step of the C major chord and the root of the nasty locrian mode).
Well, we can transpose any music and keep the progressions (using numbers) the same and it will sound the same to most of us without perfect pitch. But for a singer, picking your key is crucial. On American Idol you'll hear Luke Bryan ask a singer to move the capo up 1 fret (1/2 step) and sing it again. The difference is dramatic.
So, the intervals in any mode are fixed numerically and they can be transposed to start on any root. The white keys are just a simple way to teach the 7 types.
Learning your modes on all 7 roots is a piano players type of essential drill. They drill chord progressions, scales, polyrhythms and anything the mind can contemplate... then they have this vast arsenal of musical words to generate sentences and they are free to invent (improvise).
@bbelo : i jotted down some thoughts. sorry if this is long. hopefully, something in here is helpful to you.
A few quick thoughts about theory and modes that came to mind reading the previous posts.
First, theory.
Many great musicians have never learned theory. Learning theory isn't necessary for making music. Also, knowing theory can be helpful -- especially if your "ear" isn't (yet) highly developed -- as long as you understand why theory can be relevant. A lot of people had really bad theory teachers or learned from books that assume one grasps the context already.
Theory is NOT documenting immutable laws of what makes good music. And most theory books lean pretty heavily on the western classical music tradition and inherit a lot of bogus ideas of universality that were current in the Enlightenment and form the backbone of written theory texts. Let's get this out of the way CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING.
Unlike, say physics or math [or maths for folks that aren't American], music theory isn't documenting how the world works independent of human context . It provides a framework for understanding the rules and relationships used in a particular piece of music, culture, or era. While European composers in the 19th century might have (mistakenly) thought that they were describing what makes music work -- they were describing how their music worked. If you are trying to capture an era's musical style, theory (which all great composers will occasionally defy) can help you analyze what makes it tick (particularly if you don't have a great ear).
It turns out that for western music played on western instruments, the framework for discussing music theory has turned out to be rich and adaptable -- and it can be used to provide a lot of insight into music that doesn't use the same rules as were in play when theory first started being codified.
You don't need it, but it does provide some useful ways of communicating about music.
While you don't need theory (there are historically great musicians who know none). There is also a lot of b.s. from people that hate theory or are afraid that learning theory will stifle them. Theory will only be stifling if you think about it as rules for making music rather than tools for understanding music.
Knowing theory can help you understand why some things sound the way they do. What's different about the notes people used for solos to sound like Louis Armstrong vs. why does bebop sound different from swing?
Even if you never learn the names for things -- learning that stuff with your ear is important. Learning the theory just gives you a way of talking about it.
Most of the musicians that I know of (either from knowing them or reading interviews) that are great and don't know any theory, have great ears. If you play them something, they'll be able to play it back to you on their instrument without laboring to figure it out -- as long as it is in the realm of music that they've heard.
HAPPY/SAD The whole major is happy, minor is sad thing is cultural.
MODES/SCALES/KEYS
This is a huge topic. I'll drill down on one aspect: coming up with themes/melodies. This topic may help understand why they can be useful to know. When I say "know", I mean primarily for your ear to know it rather than to be fluent in talking about it. I unfortunately didn't understand this in my formative years. With all music 'theory', the importance is really getting it to your ears. Knowing the names of the modes and how to derive them is less important than hearing them.
What I describe below is just to help get a sense of familiarity of what the modes sound like in a simple context. This doesn't imply that when you actually end up making music that you would stick to this. But having a simple rigid framework to explore can get sounds into your ear that you can exploit when you throw away the rules.
Gross -- but hopefully helpful -- oversimplifciation.
For the sake of discussion, let's discuss melodies/songs that have a single key. Let's call the key, the chord that gives final resolution to the song's melody/theme. Let's play around with creating melodies that revolve around C Major and stick with those scales/modes that contain the notes of that chord: C E G.
Record a held C major chord. Spend time playing melodies that use the notes of the C major scale (C D E F G A
. Play a lot of melodies get that sound in your ear.
Now, do the same thing with the other modes of the diatonic scale (the major scale)
C D E F# G A B [C Lydian]
C D E F G A Bb [C Mixolydian]
That can keep you busy for a long time. If you have a great ear, you may get the sound of those modes in your ear in minutes -- but it might take days or weeks.
Once you get a feel for that (or if you get bored), you can try to construct melodies over that C major chord from non-diatonic scales and their modes.
I'd suggest sticking with a scale until you feel like you can really hear how the melodies you construct with it are distinct from the other scales / modes.
Once you have done major, do the same thing with a minor chord. For a c minor chord you've got:
C relative minor (Aeolian): C D Eb F G Ab Bb
C dorian: C D Eb F G A(natural) Bb
C phrygian: C Db Eb F G Ab Bb
Then move on to non-diatonic scales like C melodic minor and C harmonic minor and the relevant diminished and augmented scale modes.
The idea is to hear the flavor of a scale mode. Even though the modes are just rotations of the same interval pattern -- when you put them into service of resolving to the root note, they sound very different.
Hopefully, playing with those will give you a sense of why modes (whether you know their names or not) are useful
Also, Tonality is a great app if you want a reference at your fingertips for seeing scales and modes that go with a chord -- or really anything scale and chord related. Highly recommended.
Yea it sets the keyboard so you can only play in scale. Can’t hit a wrong note.