Why the Major Modes

Nearly everything you have ever heard — folk, pop, hymns, film, most jazz, most of the classical canon — is played in one family of seven notes: the major modes, the major scale and its six rotations. There are 462 ways of picking 7 of 12 notes in any octave, and yet these 7 reign supreme. I used to presume it was simply the trodden path, and that their prominence was arbitrary. Now, I'll make the opposite case: that the major modes are improbably special, being the most consonant, versatile, and accessible system you could learn with no other choices coming close.

Twelve notes, mostly noise

A fretboard or a keyboard gives you twelve notes to the octave, twelve equal steps: equal temperament. The steps were made equal for two reasons, and using all twelve at once was never one of them. Equal steps mean the same shape is the same chord from any note, so a song can be played in any key and moved between keys, and they mean an interval is the same distance everywhere, so a harmony holds across octaves and across the whole instrument. The number twelve was picked because twelve equal steps land closer to the consonant intervals — the fifth, the thirds — than any smaller number does. Twelve is the grid that lets consonance be found from anywhere; it is not a set of notes meant to be sounded together.

Sound them together and you hear why. Here is the same phrase drawn twice, with the same rhythm and the same rise and fall — once from all twelve notes over chords picked from nowhere, once from seven notes over chords from their key. Play both.

Twelve notes, or seven

↻ Again♪ Play

The first is not wrong, exactly; it is what twelve notes give you before anyone has decided anything, and making it sound like music takes a great deal of knowledge and skill — knowing, on every note and under every chord, what will agree and what will grate. The second is what a scale does: it decides in advance. Leave out the notes that grate against the rest, keep the ones that agree, and most of what you can reach sounds good before you have chosen anything. That is what a scale is for, and the rest of this page is about which notes to keep.

Walk the circle of fifths

The circle of fifths

♪ Play

Five: the pentatonic

Stop at five. C, G, D, A and E, sorted into an octave on the inner wheel, are C D E G A, the major pentatonic, and heard from its A the minor pentatonic, the same five notes. It is the scale you can hum without having learned it, the one found in music on every continent, and the one every singer and every instrumentalist gravitates toward for a melody — the first scale a guitarist learns to solo with — and the reason is what we just did to get here: every note in it was chosen because it works with the note before, so all five work with each other, and a line that stays inside them has nowhere to go wrong. Wonderful for a melody, and, as it turns out later, with more inside it than five notes suggest. Keep going.

Seven: the major modes

Look what is inside: triads

Now back to the harmony problem: what do these seven notes give us to work with? Let's pick some notes. Two consecutive notes are too close to sound well together — a tone apart is thick, a semitone grinds — so take every second note: start anywhere, skip the next, take the one after, skip again, take once more, giving us: C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, B°. Tap one to hold its chord and hear it.

A clean balance of 3 major chords and 3 minor chords, the most consonant and versatile chords there are – and an odd one out. The major triad, using harmonics 4:5:6, is the chord a single vibrating string contains in its own harmonics; the minor triad uses the same intervals with the thirds swapped, still nothing but consonant intervals and nearly as stable. The final chord, the diminished, the narrow shape, is the odd one out — and look at what is in it: B and F, the one tritone we let in on the final step of our walk along the circle. It is unstable and rarely used in modern music — NoSheet omits it entirely for pedagogical clarity.

…and each triad brings its pentatonic

Now the melody over those chords. Over any chord, the sounds that are simply the cleanest are the notes of the chord — but playing only those is boring. To give ourselves more options we could also play a pentatonic over the chord, since we know that sounds good melodically, and try to combine that with the chord tones.

Fascinatingly the major modes make this so likely that you'll probably do it accidentally. Each major and minor triad also comes with its corresponding major or minor pentatonic Switch the row to pentatonics — C's, Dm's, Em's, F's, G's, Am's — and only the diminished degree fails, needing an F♯ the scale doesn't have, drawn as a hollow wedge where it would be.

A player who stays in the scale hits a sweet note five times in seven without thinking, and a player who knows the chord's pentatonic hits one every time. And the six come in three pairs — C's five and Am's are the same notes, the five the walk found first; F's and Dm's another five; G's and Em's the third — because a pentatonic is five fifths in a row and holds one major and one minor triad, and the three are the three windows of five on the run of seven, which the circle shows. It also means the pentatonic belongs to the chord, not the key: G major's five notes are the same in C major, in G major, in D major and in every mode of those, because any run of fifths that contains the chord contains its pentatonic. Two shapes — one for a major chord, one for a minor, moved to the chord's root — and they serve over every chord in every mode. The leftover scale notes that aren't in the pentatonic then are the most potent for creating tension.

The same trick one size up: switch the row to tetrads. A seventh chord is two neighboring triads laid over each other — C major seventh is C major and E minor sharing E and G, D minor seventh is D minor and F major — so the scale gives you a major, minor or dominant seventh on six degrees and the half-diminished on the seventh, every chord chart you have ever read, in seven numerals. This is nesting: the chords, the sevenths and the melody scales are all the same seven notes, taken three, four and five at a time, and it is why the major modes are learnable — learn the triads and you are most of the way to the pentatonics and the sevenths, and with those you have the backbone of the music you know. All while using just over half the notes on your instrument.

Seven homes in one set of notes

The seven notes can be heard from seven different homes, and six of them are scales people write in (the seventh, locrian, is the one whose home chord is the diminished one). A minor — the natural minor — is the same seven notes with home on A: watch the wheel turn so A is on top, the colors settle on the new home, and the same seven chords stand in the row in a new order. D dorian is home on D, G mixolydian on G, E phrygian on E, F lydian on F. Home is not a property of the notes; it is made by what you do — the note you return to, linger on, resolve to — and the modes are one set of notes with six good places to do that from, bright to dark. The modes on guitar walks each one on the neck; the circle of fifths shows why the run of seven orders them from lydian to locrian.

Simplicity, consonance, versatility

Come back to where this started. We wanted a simplification of twelve notes that made consonance the default, and this is what the walk round the circle found: the two chords that rest, three of each, in the simplest balanced package there is, and under each of them the most consonant melodic scale there is, in three pairs that share their notes. Stay inside a major mode and it is hard to sound bad — every note you can reach agrees with most of the others, every chord you can build is one you can rest on or one that pushes you home, and every chord has a scale that fits it lying underneath.

That can sound like a cage, and to a player who has never left it, it is one. But the same six chords are the whole of the 2–5–1 that jazz has played for a century without exhausting, and the four chords under a thousand pop songs that nobody hears as the same song. A framework this consonant is not a limit on expression; it is what lets a listener follow you while you express, and what lets you put your own spin on something everyone already knows. Rules are for learners — the modes are the rules, and they are the only rules that are also, on their own, most of the music. More importantly, you need to know the rules to break them intentionally, and if you try to do it accidentally the realm of possibilities will devour you.

The alternatives are specialist tools

We've looked in detail at the internal properties of the major modes — but do other scales perhaps have similar properties? The two everyone learns next are the altered minors, and both start from A minor — the same seven notes as C major with home on A. Melodic minor is that minor with its sixth and seventh raised — F♯ and G♯ — and it is the only other seven-note set that neither crowds two semitones together nor jumps a gap of three; but its semitones sit a step closer, four whole tones on one side and one on the other, and the row shows the price of that one step: an augmented triad, the shape that points nowhere, two diminished, four chords that rest where the mode had six; and try the pentatonics — one survives, on the fourth degree, where the mode had six. Its fifths no longer run round the circle in one piece, which is why its modes are colors rather than homes: lydian dominant and the altered scale are played over one chord at a time. Classical practice says the same — melodic minor is played ascending, to reach the leading tone, and on the way down the raised notes are given up and the scale is the mode again.

Harmonic minor exists for one chord. The chord on A minor's fifth degree is E minor; raise G to G♯ and it becomes E major, the V that drags a song home to i. That single raised note leaves two closed wedges in a row between F and G♯ — an augmented second, the leap no major mode has, which a melody must jump and the iv-to-V change jumps too — and the row shows the rest of the bill: an augmented triad, diminished on the second and seventh degrees, and, tried on every degree, no pentatonic at all: with G gone the longest run of fifths it has left is four. Go further out — the double harmonic scale of the maqam Hijaz Kar, the Hungarian minor — and there are two leaps, clusters, and degrees that stack into nothing a chord chart has a name for.

These are real scales with real repertoires, and every one of them is a specialist tool: more to learn, more that can go wrong once learned, fewer chords to rest on and fewer scales to play over them — a color to borrow for a chord or a phrase, on the way back to seven notes that are balanced. The major modes are not the beginner's version of these. They are the thing the others are variations of.

Discovered, not designed

The magnificent part is that we did not engineer the major modes to have these qualities — we did not ask and answer how to make the most consonant, versatile, and accessible system. People didn't walk the circle of 5ths and analyze the harmonic series, and we didn't design instruments in equal temperament with the major modes in mind. It was found by searching and exploring, over centuries and on every continent, the way gold is found — and what was found is a musical toy that lets everyone play together: accessible, learnable in a reasonable time, and the foundation for whatever a player wants to do next, since every excursion leaves from it and returns to it.

That is why NoSheet teaches it.

Start with the scale on this page: hear a phrase in it and play it back, on guitar, bass, ukulele or piano — or its minor, the same notes from A — or, to hear the argument of this page directly, the triads of a key by ear.