Pattern Generation

Tag: patterns

  • 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!

  • Welcome to Phrygia, Good Luck in the Battle! Octave Pedal Tone Exercise in C from E to E (or 3 to 3).

    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!

    Here is the Tab:

    Octave Pedal Tone in C (E Phrygian)Download

    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!