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Favourite Diatonic Mode


DAI

What's your favourite diatonic mode?  

36 members have voted

  1. 1. What's your favourite diatonic mode?

    • Ionian (Major)
      3
    • Dorian
      21
    • Phrygian
      18
    • Lydian
      19
    • Mixolydian
      9
    • Aeolian ( Natural Minor)
      5
    • Locrian
      4


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definitely dorian for me.

i cant stand aeolian, simply because i cant stand natural minor scales and i always expect them to be harmonic or melodic.

Harmonic and melodic minor sound so corny, ugh, I love aeolian. It's probably the most popular mode nowadays, especially in mainstream music.

My favorites are aeolian and ionian. Wow am I the first to choose these?

Out of the more non-standard ones I like Lydian.

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Really? Usually when I improvise something in Lydian, the dominant seems to be stealing the tonic.

I just mean that Lydian - i.e. the raised 4th is more "natural", theoretically.

The interval of a 5th is the "strongest harmonic interval". Stacking 5ths, when placed in tertian order, results in the Lydian scale.

Also, the overtone series fails to produce a natural-4 even when carried out to 20 harmonics. (the 11th overtone is technically 1/100th of a semitone closer to F# ..to-may-toe, to-mah-toe)

;)

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I just mean that Lydian - i.e. the raised 4th is more "natural", theoretically.

The interval of a 5th is the "strongest harmonic interval". Stacking 5ths, when placed in tertian order, results in the Lydian scale.

Also, the overtone series fails to produce a natural-4 even when carried out to 20 harmonics. (the 11th overtone is technically 1/100th of a semitone closer to F# ..to-may-toe, to-mah-toe)

;)

Well, if you stack 5ths, all you technically get is a set of pitches, and depending on how many fifths you stack, how you order them and where you start, you get very different results. By stacking seven fifths and reordering them to a scale (or chord of thirds), you can get any of the 7 diatonic modes, depending on which tone you start with. Sure you can say that if you start with the lowest of the seven, you get lydian, but it seems a bit sought-after for me to claim any "naturality" in this, since the principle of reordering the pitches in the first place is a very conscious and artificially constructive idea, whithout which no scale would result.

I find the second explanation more logical, to make a direct comparisation with the first occurence of something "scale-like" in the harmonic series - i.e. the part between the 8th and 16th partial. Lydian and mixolydian get closer to that than the other modes, and even more so a mixture of both (lydian b7). Bartok used that one quite a bit. The closest solution in 12-tone equal temperament would be an octatonic scale such as C-D-E-F#-G-Ab-Bb-B, which is almost identical with Messiaen's third mode (which just would have an additional Eb in this example).

The funny thing is that I've always been partial to Messiaen's third mode, but hadn't realized this connection until right now.

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[blah blah stacking 5ths] if you start with the lowest of the seven, you get lydian, but it seems a bit sought-after for me to claim any "naturality" in this, since the principle of reordering the pitches in the first place is a very conscious and artificially constructive idea, whithout which no scale would result.

Which is where George Russell's "Tonal Gravity" comes into play...

"Tonal Gravity, or 'tonal magnetism' within a stack of intervals of fifths flows in a downward direction. The tone F# yields to B as its tonic -- F# and B surrender "tonical" authority to E, and so on down the ladder of fifths -- the entire stack conferring ultimate tonical authority on it's lowermost tone, C." (From George Russell's LCCOTO)

:shifty:

BUT, yes. I totally get what your saying...and am only just now really starting to think about it.

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