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So F And G .. .over root C .... Ionian
F and G over root D....dorian
F and G over root G ...mixolydian ect
But these can be transposed
Say
F and G over C is C ionian
Bb and C over C root note is C mixolydian
Hope it makes sense
I think I’m more intrigued about how one chooses ‘borrowed chords’ etc for spicing up a chord sequence etc. Is there a simple explanation of how to use / access them ?
Creep Radiohead .... in G maj but uses borrowed Cm from the Gm scale ...... chucking in a borrowed minor 4th chord is a common and effective trick
Any song in a major Key with a 1, flat 7, 4 and there must be hundreds (sympathy for the devil for example)
Sometimes it's often a quick borrowed flat 3 or 7 ... Please Please me chucks in a quick G which is a flat 3rd of it's Emaj key
Intro to Whisky in the jar .... songs in G maj but first 3 chords are G, F and Em so quick flat 7
Supportact said: [my style is] probably more an accumulation of limitations and bad habits than a 'style'.
Something I realised yesterday for the first time ( although I may have realised it before and forgotten) is why a lot of minor blues have a dominant major chord on the V or IV and V.
Not a very famous song but All Your Love by Magic Sam is based around Bminor but the E and F# chords are dominant majors.
* the major third and the dominant seventh are a flattened fifth apart.
You get a lot of 6ths in rock and roll/ blues ( Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed,etc) partly because that’s where your finger ends up playing shuffle lines. So that pulls through to AC/DC and blues rock.
Ninths, elevenths and thirteenths were used in swing and jump and uptown blues so that's BB King, T Bone Walker and then through to funk and soul. Lots of James Brown songs, for example, use ninths and we hear that as funky now ( especially partial shapes a la Nile Rodgers).
Hendrix had played in both traditions so he mixed up ninths and sixths,etc, although arguably you have the freedom to do that over a bass line as opposed to a bigger arrangement.
The basic tension in blues was playing around between the major and minor third ( pretty much everything by Muddy Waters) and that gets formalised in chord changes sometimes. When I was playing Madness covers they quite often just went between major and minor versions of the same chord which again builds tension. I guess if everything is diatonic it's harder to create tension.
In ska and reggae there is a tradition of playing the II chord as a major whereas diatonically you'd expect minor. Otis Redding wrote songs on a guitar tuned to open G so some of his songs ( Dock of the Bay I'm fairly sure) are all majors but not diatonic. So that's both sweet and tense at the same time.
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
Regarding ACDC the clue is in the title. Play it, it sounds nice. Not a mode in sight.
Learning how to harmonise the modes is good to know but really has very little application IMO.
Personally, I don't, or rather didn't, know the exact key that I write songs in as I usually use powerchords, so things can be sort of vague in that regard and I would have ad libbed using mode shapes that somewhat-fitted and tried to adjust as necessary. Sometimes it worked out great, sometimes it didn't, sometimes it seemed like I had unnecessarily stuck my head up my arse.
At the end of the day, it's what sounds best to you as well as what the trained theorists say. Have fun.
This video on modal interchange is absurdly slick and fun. 4 minutes and 26 seconds of musical enlightenment. I also second the recommendation of Signals Music Studio whose videos are always fun, well explained and practical.
As for why those modal backing tracks often only have two or three chords, it’s because a lot of the modes (all except Ionian and Aeolian) are quite unstable so certain chords have a tendency to undermine them and bring the ear into Ionian or Aeolian.
One simple trick that Cobain seems to have used is to write a section with melody using triads, then just play it with power chords which creates some ambiguity which is cleared up here and there by the melody. This can result in chords that are more muscular and melody that is more prominent and meaningful - a win win.
As you have probably found writing with power chords rather than triads also allows more flexibility because it’s easier to make unconventional or non-diatonic chord changes work smoothly e.g. I to bIII and other “up a minor third” changes. Combine this flexibility with the melodicism and raw power of the “turn triads into power chords” method and you have the start of a powerful songwriting toolkit without needing a particularly deep knowledge of theory.
Old videos of Frank Gambale is a prime candidate of that I’ve seen. Goes so fast in his explanation that it just becomes a circus act to me