Music Theory for Songwriters

Part Ten
Understanding Modes

Imagine for a moment that time rolled backwards and you found yourself in a chapter in history where they hadn’t yet discovered the sharps and flats, and "pianos" (which wouldn't have been around yet, but if they had been) had only white notes, and the only major scale available was C.

So you accepted those limitations, and wrote a few songs in the key of C major, but then you wanted a new sound, something that would be different. So you looked down at your hands, and the thought came, "What if I shifted my hands one note to the right?"

Let me pause here to correct a possible misunderstanding. In our modern world of music, we have a concept called "transposing." By it we mean that we can take a song and move every note up (or down) by a certain number of half steps. When we do this, the result is a little higher (or lower), but because we shifted every note the same amount, the song still sounds like it did before. The relative jumps from note to note have not changed.

Now, back to the "unusual piano missing the black notes.” We know that the jumps from note to note in the C major scale follow the formula whole - whole - half - whole - whole - whole - half. In other words, the distance from note 1 to note 2 is a wider gap than from 3 to 4. So even though our unusual piano may look to our eyes as though each note is evenly spaced, we know in the world of sound and frequencies it isn't that way.

Perhaps we can say it like this: just because the black notes have not yet been discovered doesn't mean they are not there. We still have to leave a space for them in our minds, because we know they will come along later.

So you shifted your hands one note to the right and played one of the songs you had written in C major, but now, because the whole and half step jumps are at a different place under your hands, this new version of your song sounded quite different.

Great! We wanted a different sound. That was the purpose of shifting the song in the first place.

So you stepped back for a minute and asked, "What was it I just did?" And then you realized that you took the original key of C major (where we number the notes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 - with the note C being note 1, D being note 2, and so on), and "renumbered" it so the D is now note 1, E is note 2, etc.

Then you realized there was nothing to stop you from shifting again. What if E was note 1, or F, or G? In fact, there are seven different notes, any one of which could be note 1. Therefore you could play your song in seven different places, the original (in C major) and six other places, by shifting the song to the right.

When this grows clear in your thinking, there's something else important to grasp. We used the key of C major in our example, because it's easy to see that all the notes are evenly spaced, and you can imagine shifting your hands one note to the right without any difficulty. But coming back into the present, we could have used any of the 12 major keys on our modern piano.

For example, the key of Db major has 5 black notes and 2 white notes. Keep those 7 notes, and remove the rest. Now 5 white notes are missing. It's not as easy this time to play the same song while shifting, because the scale notes, being both black and white, are not spaced evenly. Still, with practice, you could probably do it. And you could renumber the notes just like we did before; the math isn't any harder.

What this means is any song (using only scale notes) written in any of the 12 major keys can be played in its original location (where note 1 is the name of the key), and can also be played six other ways, each time shifting the hands one more scale note to the right, and renumbering the keys so that note 1 is at a new place.

This idea of shifting the notes needed some names, and so the ancient Greeks (because they were thinking about this) gave each of these locations a name.