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Showing posts from April, 2021

Modes from the Pentatonic Scale

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 I would suggest reading other posts in this series that explain Scales and Modes before going further with this post. If you find this article useful, please subscribe, it really helps my blog. This is taken from a previous post:- Learning Modes from the Pentatonic Scale As the name suggests the Pentatonic Scale is made up of 5 notes. Depending on whether you are looking at the Major or Minor Pentatonic Scale, will depend on the scale degrees used in that scale.    The Major Pentatonic scale is made up of the 1st - Major 2nd- Major 3rd- Perfect 5th - Major 6th,    The Minor Pentatonic scale constitutes the 1st - minor 3rd - Perfect 4th - Perfect 5th - minor 7th, and you can see a comparison between both scales below.       The obvious thing to say about this is that shape 1 is followed by shape 2, etc. Also, if you look closely, you can see how the shapes match each other as they move along the fretboard, i.e. shape 1 of the Minor Pentatonic is the same as shape 5 of the Major Pentato

What are Modes?

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    modes (sounds scary, eh?) Not really. Music modes explained   Modes in music have been around for a long time, they are nothing new. They were formalized in the 1600’s and are used in all types of music and used by a wide variety of musical instruments. Should I learn modes? Learning modes allows you to colour any tune you are playing, or improvising, with feeling. It also allows the sound of the song to focus on a differing tonal centre. If your playing is beginning to sound boring and you feel you are stuck in a rut, this could another reason to study modes. Modes can be seen as scales within a parent scale. Many people use mode and scale to mean the same thing, however, this is not strictly true. A mode can be seen as a scale of it’s parent scale, derived from a different point in the parent scale. All modes are scales but not all scales are modes. The Blues Scale for example is not a mode. From the picture above,