It’s kind of interesting that for a scale that has so much in common with the restful and homebody-esque major scale, the Mixolydian Mode couldn’t really be any more energetically different.
Major/Ionian = home/grounded
Mixolydian = uprooted/restless
It is hard to argue that the ungrounded and restless nature of the mixolydian mode and its harmonic partner, the Dominant 7th chord, are what made it the definitive melodic and harmonic material for the blues. The Blues, after all, was essentially the music of a culture of people who were taken from their homes, held captive, made to work as slaves, and we’re essentially powerless to return home. They were stuck in an existential embodiment of the mixolydian mode.
I hope that doesn’t sound trite because it really isn’t.
That deeply embedded bluesy quality of the Mixolydian Mode is what made it important to realize this Octave Pedal Tone exercise with a shuffle feel. Technically this requires a right hand/arm physicality that is similar to what the great Stevie Ray Vaughn does to achieve the rhythmic feel of songs like Pride & Joy and Rude Mood.
Downstroke on the beat and upstroke on the triplet 8th that defines the shuffle, sometimes from the hand/wrist and sometimes from the forearm. Make sure to always stay as loose as possible and put rhythm and groove over string and note accuracy. Let the accuracy come as the physical develops, the physical development will never lead you to groove if it’s coming from a place of cautious accuracy.
There are a couple of occasions in this mixo manifestation where the moving voice extends into the double octave. I feel these moments sound especially bluesy. But then so do the moments when the ascending voice moves in toward the unison and we hear the flat 7th (F) rub idiosyncratically against the root (G). I guess it’s silly to say that any of the registers sound more or less bluesy than others because it’s all pretty danged bluesy.
Thanks for caring enough to stop by and grab the tab. Stay tuned for the next step of the scale, the Aeolian mode (or relative minor). Keep in mind that these modal focused OPTs are really just the foundation of all the exploratory pattern generational fun that lies ahead.
Ordinarily I try to stay away from clickbait videos on youtube. Unless it has to do with cooking or tying knots or some other skill I am working on developing, I try to avoid it all. But once in a while I click on guitar/theory/music related ones just to see what people are on about; once in a while there are real gems, but usually it’s super annoying!
On this fine early spring Saturday morning I saw Matteo Mancuso’s smiling face and, knowing how brilliant he is, I clicked. The title of course was full on clickbait and the comments section was a den of keyboard music theory warriors crying foul of his use of non major scale note choices. I felt this was a bit over the top and his solo sounded pretty diatonic to my ears as he weaved around the non-diatonic chords in the progression. Obviously there were a couple of nods to the changes but I chose to transcribe the solo to see to what extent my ears might have been deceiving me. I was stoked to find that my original impression was the accurate one.
There is no question that Matteo Mancuso is one of the young shining lights of guitar music, his chops, his improvisational skills, his tone, his demeanour, he is everything that a successful young professional musician needs to have; take note if you are aspiring to make music your career: be a good person who plays exceedingly well and you have a shot at paying your bills with your instrument for your whole lifetime!
The thing that invariably makes me shake my head a little is the comments section. Uuuugh!! Now, this video (to which I will link below) is supposed to be an example of Matteo playing on a soulful little loop using only the C Major scale. The progression is as follows: ll:CMaj7 / / / l E7 / / / lFMaj7 / / / lG7 / / / :ll On the 3rd repeat the G7 is replaced by an Fmin7 (a tasty little iv-7 is never a bad choice, unless it happens everytime!).
Obviously this is a highly skilled and tasty piece of guitar mastery! The frustrating thing is twofold. First of all it’s the clickbait title: no one can just “unlock” the major scale and play like this. The scale is not the only part of what is happening here! The chord changes are the prism through which the light of the notes refract and create different colours. The chord progression is also 1/4 non-diatonic, i.e. the E7 chord presents some navigational issues that might force a novice guitarist/improvisor to question their life choices when they keep landing on the G natural and being made to wonder why it sounds the way it does. The Fmin7 in the 3rd repeat is non-diatonic as well, forcing the player to navigate a chord that has just shifted two of the major scale’s notes to the flat side (Ab, Bb and Eb in this case). So we’re doing a lot more than “unlocking” the Major Scale! Come on Paul!
The second frustrating aspect of falling for clickbait titles is the Comments section! Now just like I’m doing here we have almost nothing but people crying foul on the title as well. Most everyone is choosing to point out that there is more going on than just the Major scale. Lots of observations of b13s, which is not exactly correct in a sense because while an Ab is inded the b6th of the key of C, it happens to be sounding during the E7 chord. This makes it enharmonically a G#, which would make it more accurately a #5 but even more accurately it has, in that moment, nothing at all to do with being a #5 in C because what it really is is a beautifully rendered M3rd on the E7 chord which he arrives at by enclosing within a little E, G, A, melodic sequence which is at once diatonic, and also sweetly pentatonic. Speaking of Pentatonic. One commenter suggested it wasn’t all the Major scale, it had pentatonics as well. We would all do well to appreciate that the pentatonic scale is a frame of the Major scale in the same way that 2x4s are the frame of the house but there is a lot more going on in the finished house than just the studs. Any pentatonic scale is contained within 3 different major scales and so it is not “not the majorscale” just because Matteo chose to use a note sequence that fit within our conventional sense of what a pentatonic scale position “feeeeels” like.
There are two very fleeting moments in bar 8 and near the end in bar 14 where Matteo spices up the solo with a b3 blue note on the C chord. In bar 14 he does this sweet bend from the 10th fret D to the 12th fret E but upon the release of the bend he does a quick little half step bend up to the Eb/b3 (11th fret)then back to the D. He then completes the phrase by pulling-off to the C and returning to the D. This is a very expressive technique and is very difficult to pull off so you should spend some time trying to get it. The early example is a quick upper neighbour slide that is truly felt more than it is heard. But calling these little embellishments non-diatonic is as overblown as claiming that Indian raga is microtonal. It really isn’t that microtonal. Indian Raga is predominantly diatonic/modal with chromatic embellishments that stand out to our ears because they are not the embellishments that most of us are accustomed to hearing.
Anyhoo. In bar 12 Matteo comes across the Fmin7 chord and chooses to express himself on this chord by playing a speedy descending phrase in what is essentially F Dorian but he passes chromatically through the E natural, hearkening to the Be-Bop dominant scale but is otherwise just playing diatonically the most inside note choices possible for the F minor sonority. Yes it’s outside of the C Major scale but ny the tone of the comments section you’d think he just quoted a Schoenberg 12-tone row!
In closing remember, Click Bait sucks and don’t read the comments section when anything related to music theory is being tossed around because it will be 98% overblown and wrong and you will lose brain cells in the process of trying to keep up with the rage bait of the average person’s posts: )
So here is my transcription of Matteo’s great romp through Paul David’s backing track. Have a look at the notation and you will see very few instances of accidentals. In my summation he did a stellar job of keeping his ideas within the boundaries of Mr. Davids’ prompt!
Here we encounter the octave pedal-tone exercise starting on the third note of the C Major scale, aka the Phrygian mode.
The ancient Greek region of Phrygia is known to have a couple of very famous figureheads and was constantly at war! The Phrygians participated in the Trojan war; they were for a time led by Gordius, famous for his Gordian Knot; and Midas, the mythological King who’s touch turned everything to gold are all part of the Phrygian story.
In the Phrygian mode we discover some very exotic tensions and, interestingly enough, the mirror image of the Major scale in terms of the perfect intervals (4th, 5th and of course octave) all remaining steadfast in their qualitative resolve but all of the Major intervals present in the major scale, the 2nd, 3rd, 6th, and 7th, shift to their minor quality. So where’s we can represent the Major scale as the numbers 1 through 8 with no modifications, we represent the Phrygian mode as follows: 1 b2 b3 4 5 b6 b7 8. Try to enjoy the changing character of each different modal pedal tone exercise while you embrace the possible challenge of learning the location of these notes and the technique required to play it. I promise you your hands will be more agile than ever and you WILL know your fingerboard better than you ever thought possible!
While there are a multitude of pathways we can choose to navigate through any octave pedal tone exercise, I decided for some reason to make this one a little challenging. We begin on the upper octave and shift the low voice to the off beats, creating a need to articulate in such a way that we don’t displace ourselves from the downbeat. If you’ve listened to the demo video you will hear that it’s all too easy for the ear to reorient itself within the pulse when the lower voice is the one that is moving–even though it’s on the offbeat–we just naturally want that to be where the beat is. In the interest of humility I will say I could have done a better job delineating that by accenting the beat and playing the offbeat with a softer dynamic. Something to work on, for me and for you!
After this we go from the almost darkest of the modes to the very brightest with the Lydian. Things get progressively darker moving through Mixolydian, Aeolian and finally Locrian before we finish our elementary investigation into the octave pedal-tone exercises.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, we’re not even halfway there yet. Stay tuned for the E Phrygian played in alternating low/high triplets: COMING SOON!
Thanks for visiting and as always, Happy Practicing!
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: )
Pattern Generation 