Pattern Generation

Tag: lydian

  • A Long Way From Home: Octave Pedal Tone in F Lydian

    Experiencing harmonic relationships and functions through analogies to travel away from, and returning to, a home base can be very helpful for our understanding and our ear training. Associating chords and progressions in a key in this way can help us understand why some songs and chord sequences can be so evocative of the emotions they convey and also help to shed some insight on why we like the sounds we like and how to write better songs more easily.

    To this end I will share with you how I feel about the diatonic chords and they feelings of push and pull away from our restful tonic home base.

    We can always experience our tonic, or I chord, as being at home, at rest. No tension, all release. From there and without belabouring the point, I will just share that I feel the colours and tensions of the other chords in the following ways.

    The ii- chord is like going away from home, on a trip of some kind. The Dorian mode sort of brings the calm tension of getting to the airport on time but you’re still always a little nervous until your plane takes off.

    The iii-chord embodies all the exoticism of being in a new and relatively foreign land. You are very much traveling away from home at this point.

    The IV chord to me is the point on your trip when you are the most away from from home and the most settled into that space. It’s exotic, it’s hopefully, it’s dramatic, it’s positive, it’s never boring.

    The V7 chord is the end of your trip, it’s compelling you to return home; you’ve had all the food, you’ve had all the drink, you miss your own bed and your own space! The b7 in the V chord is the urge to just get to the airport in one whole piece without forgetting anything.

    The vi- chord is your melancholic reflection on the travel home. You’re glad to have gone away, you’re somewhat maybe sad to leave new friends, and maybe an intimate experience or two, behind and you’re reflecting on the return to work and life and the attendant pressures of being an adult human in the world!

    The vii° is unsettled, like a rocky landing in the airplane, or a temporarily misplaced or lost suitcase, or a friend who’s delayed in picking you up at the airport. It’s also very much connected to the V7 chord, being in the same harmonic function category, so it carries all the same tensions and pushes us to just want to return home, albeit in a much more tense and unsettled way.

    With all that being said, the Lydian mode is, to me, the melodic and harmonic region of the key that is both the furthest home while being at the same time the most restful.

    One way to view the Lydian mode in a stand alone kind of way is as a major scale with a raised 4th degree; it is so much more than that, but it is also that!

    The lydian mode, or IV chord of the Major scale gives us my personally most favourite extended chord, the Maj7#11. The Lydian (subdominant) is a diatonic region that, like Dorian, which is also subdominant, contains no ‘bad’ notes. Some schools call these notes “avoid notes” but what they really are are notes within the scale that sit a half step above a chord tone. If we look at the IV chord in C, we can observe that even if we look all the way up the stack of 3rds to the 13th of the chord, at no point do we find a non-chord tone that is a half step above a chord tone. 1-M2, M3-#4, P5-M6, M7-P8 is a half step but it is to the octave, M9-M10, #11-P12 is a half step but it is to a chord tone, and M13 to M14 (not a technically used degree because it is the higher octave of the M7th but I’ve used it, along with the P12th, just for observational clarity.) if we follow the same chord-tone/non chord-tone analysis with the ii- cord we find the same thing, there are no non chord tones going a half step above a chord tone, i.e. neither scale/mode/harmonic area result in any avoid tones.

    Octave Pedal Tone in F LydianDownload

    Beyond that and more to the point of this particular Octave Pedal Tone exercise, I have used a rhythmic pattern that places the pedal tone on the and of beats 1 and 3 throughout. So if the low voice is moving through the scale it will be articulated on the 1, the 2 and the & of 2 of each 4 eighth note grouping. Likewise if the moving voice is the higher of the two, it will be the 1st, 3rd and 4th of the pattern while the portal time will be 2nd only.

    The other articulatory aspect of this rhythmic approach/manifestation is that I have indicated slurs, i.e. hammers, pulls, and slides, to move from note to note. This is an evolution in our approach to using creative techniques to enhance what might otherwise be slightly boring or stagnant exercises

    As always, thanks for visiting and Happy Practicing!

  • A Step Away from Home: Octave Pedal Tone Exercise in D Dorian

    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: )

    Octave Pedal Tone (D Dorian)Download

    Thanks for visiting/downloading/listening and happy practicing! to you!