As we build our awareness of the fingerboard on our way to becoming fluent and fluid with the Pattern Generation approach to creative practicing, we must develop our mastery over the major scale. This journey means that we are going to be playing the Octave Pedal Tone exercises from and to notes in the scale other than the Tonic. These can be thought of by their Modal signifiers or they can just be thought of as the Major scale from the 2nd scale degree to the 2nd scale degree an octave higher or lower.
Or the 3rd or the 4th or the 5th etc, etc.
The reason that I’m using the Modal label for these is that (because of the fact that we are pedalling back to the root every other note) we are actually really hearing the mode and it’s colours and tensions, consonance and dissonance in a meaningful way. Every time we hit the root and then go to the next scale degree we are hearing the colour of those notes relative to that pedal tone. There are actually a few different layers of thought that we can be exploring when navigating through the modes in this way.
One layer of thought or perception that we might explore as we move through the exercise is that we have started on the 2nd scale degree and so the W/H pattern will orient itself around that starting point. That is to clumsily say that the 3 of the major scale will be the second note and the 4 will be the third etc. You might narrate the exercise in just that way, i.e. “2 goes a whole step to 3 goes a half step to 4 goes a whole step to 5 goes a whole step to 6 goes a whole step to 7 goes a half step to 8 goes a whole step to 2/9”. There’s a fluidity to that passage that can fit nicely within the 8th note rhythm of a basic pedal tone exercise; you should try it: )
Another perspective you can have is that you are playing a Dorian mode, which is a minor scale with a Major 6th; a Major scale with a flattened 3rd and 7th; or a minor scale that has the scale template: W-H-W-W-W-H-W.
You could also just stay within the musical alphabet and remember that E & F and B & C are always a half step apart while every other adjacent pair is always a whole step.
Whatever perspective you take, what we’re really trying to do here is develop a sense of control, awareness, and fluidity over the scale so that we can reduce limitations and elevate our ability to create and move through the infinite variety of patterns available to us as we write or improvise or work on new melodic/harmonic vocabulary.
This video is played at 80 bpm but you can and should feel open to slowing it down or speeding it up. You can and should add rhythm. You can use a pedal like the EHX Freeze to lay down a chord and hear the harmonic context of all this goodness.
Speaking of playing a pad or chord in the background while playing this exercise, that is exactly the reason why I am not a huge fan of the fact that I have called this exercise a Dorian exercise. It is absolutely the case that if we play this pattern by itself or while sounding a Dmin chord we will hear the character and qualities of the Dorian mode. However, if you play this over a G7 chord/groove you will hear the sound of Mixolydian. If you play it over FMaj7 you will hear it as a Lydian sound. Why is that? Because it’s the chord that defines the modal character/perspective, not the scale!
Mostly.
If you are playing over a drone, let’s say D, and you use the notes of the C Major scale, you will hear the characteristics of Dorian but, if you then shift your note choices to the key of A, you will have manifested the D Lydian mode. Modal music does allow for these creative impositions of modal shifting, but for the vast majority of Classical, pop, blues, jazz, traditional music etc what we are generally experiencing is music that is based around harmonic and melodic interactions, i.e. chord progressions and melodies. If a song has chords that change every couple of beats or bars, it is then, by definition, not Modal music. This is why I struggle to direct a student’s focus towards modal delineations. For certain taxonomically valid reasons however, modal labels have to be acknowledged as useful: )
Thanks for visiting/downloading/listening and happy practicing! to you!
Pattern Generation 
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