Originally Posted by
Hawgdriver
I think maybe I did? Was it about 1 hr 55m?
This is about to get nerdy but I know my audience and think it's worth the effort:
Lydian mode for someone with minimal musical background.
Imagine a piano. You have white keys and black keys. Did you know that if you only play the black keys that this is playing a 'pentatonic' scale? What that means is that it's very musical. Enough of that.
If you play only the white keys, there are seven notes--C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. And I began with C for a reason--the C-major scale is kind of the universal solvent of music, like water. You can doodle around but as long as you involve C and make sure you end on a C, you will do something musical. It's just how the western ear is these days. This is the C-major scale, it begins with C and ends with C.
What's interesting is that the C major scale avoids the black keys. However, each key is equivalent and identical--this is the premise of modern instrument tuning. It's called TET-12 or EQ-12 or something like that, it doesn't matter, but the idea is that between each octave there are 12 'steps' or 'tones' or 'intervals', but each 12th one is kind of identical to each other--they form a class (C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B). This is why there are several 'C' notes or 'C# notes (also sometimes called Db notes)'. The thing to remember is that each interval from one note to the next is an identical interval. The frequency difference will increase, but maybe not on a logarithmic scale--the important thing is that each octave is a precise doubling of frequency.
Ok, I think I lost everyone.
The important thing--12 semi-tones or intervals or notes, they are basically 12 slices of an octave pie.
In the C-major scale that avoids the black keys, that scale avoids these notes: C#, D#, F#, G#, A#. So it has 7/12 of them.
Now here is where it all starts to make sense. There is a precise pattern to all major scales, and it is this: 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 2, 1. That is, the interval between consecutive/subsequent notes in the major scale is additive, C +2, then +2, then +1, then +2, ...
So it skips C#, D#, but goes directly from E to F, skips F#, etc.
This pattern exists for all major scales that begin on any arbitrary note.
So for the F# major scale, it will also follow the 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 2, 1 pattern. F# plus 2 is G#. Then plus 2 is A#. Then plus 1 is B. Then plus 2 is C#, and so on.
I know this is super mathy, but here is the payoff.
You can get all kinds of funky if you mess around with patterns. Lydian, for example, uses a 2, 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1 pattern. The easiest way to explain this is that if you only played white keys on the piano, but began and ended with 'F', you have the F-Lydian scale (mode is what it's called but the meaning is essentially the same). Think about it--F, G, A, B, C, D, E. There is no black key between B and C nor E and F. So it's a 2, 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1 pattern.
This is cool because it gives a notably different sound that is hard to put into words. Listen to Watermelon in Easter Hay and that is what 'Lydian' means. It just has a kind of sound like herbs have a scent.
Rush and Yes and many prog bands mess around in a similar manner. Rush has a lot of Phyrigian mode stuff. I'm not sure off the top of my head what Phyrigian is, but it is a variation/re-ordering of the 2221221 order. It might be 1221222, or 1222122.
There are exactly 7 of these modes, and they each have a kind of distinctive sound. A lot of folk music is distinctive based on the usage of these types of modes. And these particular modes are just one template for manipulating this 12-tone structure that modern instruments are premised upon.
What I think is pretty sweet is that the song I just shared by King Gizz was from their 'Flying Microtonal Banana' album in which they experiment with microtonal music, that is, using notes outside of that 12-tone structure.
omg, what did I just do