Hey guys,
I made this table years ago to help me setup harmonies and stuff. Figured I’d share. It looks like a bit of blanks space on the left, but that’s because i set this up for a wallpaper for my desktop, and wanted room for my icons n shit.
So what this table does is lay out the modes of C major, its relationships, and notes. Don’t know what the notes of the dominant chord of C Lydian is? Fuck, I made this and I still wouldn’t know unless I looked. That’s why this exists. It is pretty information dense, so ill cover what you should know before delving into it. I made this so you shouldn’t have to know exactly how the chords are derived, just to reference and look this up later if you are interested.
- Each mode has a different color. At the far left under its name are the notes involved. We will get to the Relative Mode part later, you kinda need to know how everything is laid out before you understand how to interpret this.
- Each mode’s line will include the chords you find there, both the triads, 7th and alt-7th chords. Triads are just 3 note chords, 7th chords are the same ones, with another note. That note is usually the 7th interval of the chord’s root note (the one it is named for, C for C major for instance). For those wondering why there are two types of 7th chords present, basically in cases like the VII scale degree of Ionian, following the formula for building chords leads you with a gnarly-sounding diminished chord (dim). Using the Bmin7b5 is just a hacky way to make it sound good. This is one of those “just trust me” things. Since its conventional, even though the diminished chords are technically “correct”, i made them green and not the first ones you see.
- At the bottoms of each chord, there is a list of notes you play to voice that chord. They are color coded, so to voice the triad, you voice the notes of that mode’s color, and to voice a 7th, you just add either the magenta or green 7th interval listed. Easy peasy.
- I have included a red or blue border around chord names to more easily show if they are major or minor. Red = Major, Blue = Minor.
- The “Brightness Tracker”: This is an alternate ordering of the modes that shows, relative to C Ionian, the changes that occur to the scales. For instance, when you go from Ionian to Mixolydian, you flat the 7th scale degree, going from a B to a Bb. The arrows pointing up and down indicate how “bright” or “dark” any given mode is compared to the other. The term brightness kinda sucks, but its the closest normal word for it. In real terms, the more you flatten, the darker it is, and the more you sharpen the more “bright” it is. This effect works because of our familiarity with Ionian / Major.
- I underline the notes of a scale that are the most indicative of that scale’s identity. When you see that the Bb in C Mixolydian is underlined, thats because the one thing that changed between Ionian and Mixolydian was that flattened 7th scale degree (Bb). Dorian also has the flattened 7th scale degree (Bb), but from Mixolydian to Dorian, the only thing changed was the flattened 3rd scale degree (Eb). This is why Eb is underlined in Dorian!
- So, in addition, the chords listed also indicate their harmonic function. These can be categorized in three main groups, but each one has a different specific purpose. In general, its all about tension. Tension is basically that pull you feel when a bit of music wants to “resolve”. The Tonic is the chord that feels like home, and where the music feels it should come back to. Dominant chords have the most “pull” and give the most feeling of needing to resolve to the Tonic. Subdominant chords have that pull that Dominants have, only it isnt nearly as strong. The crazy nest of arrows is a guide for directions you can take your harmonies. Remember this is art n shit there arnt any rules. This is just a guideline of what the tension should sound like going from one to the other. You read it by looking at the chord you are on, then follow an up arrow to a down arrow. This generally follows the direction the chords are used, and depending on what side of the colored line it appears on, it will indicate if the tension is raised or lowered. Note that in the case of the Tonic, you can only raise the tension, and the Subtonic can only lower tension. The Mediant is special in that it really shares a lot in common with a lot of harmonic functions. That’s why its all rainbow-y.
- You can actually use this chart not only for Parallel mode analysis, but for Relative as well. Parallel modes (in the key of C) are C Ionian, C dorian, C phrygian etc. So modes are parallel if they share the same tonic (in that case C). Relative modes are a bit different. A Relative mode is a mode that uses all the same notes, but has a different Tonic. The classic example is C Major vs A minor. They all have the same notes, but in A minor, the A is re-contextualized as the Tonic. So beleive it or not, this chart can help with that too, albeit it may be a bit confusing at first. I’ll explain with an example. Say you wanted to write in G Dorian. First, find G Dorian in the Relative Mode section, then think of that as your scale degree 1. If you want to know the 4th scale degree of G Dorian, starting with G Dorian (your new “Tonic”), and count to 4 wrapping around to the beginning if you need to.
I hope this helps to anyone looking for a reference. As always, feel free to ask questions or correct my mistakes or oversimplifications.