Piano Lessons Tulsa | Modes and Other Obscure Scales
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
In the previous edition of the Curtis Music Academy podcast for piano lessons Tulsa. We had described many different concepts. We described why it is important for an instructor to listen to your students and have a good idea about what is going on there. And then we also talked about different exercises and things that you can do to improve your ability as a piano student or as someone who takes piano lessons. So today what we are going to be doing is diving in a little bit deeper a little bit.
More crazy ideas and concepts for your piano playing. Throughout the course of learning the instrument today we will be talking about an advanced topic, a topic that in all honesty, I think it should be avoided as opposed to implemented the majority of the time. I feel as though instructors throw this concept in way too often and it’s not beneficial for the majority of musicians and it causes more harm than good.
And instructors apply this concept of way too early when students are not ready for it. So the whole reason I have spoken this much about this concept without even bringing up the concept yet is because I preface this entire article with the fact that if you are taking piano lessons Tulsa, that chances are this is not a concept that you need to know right now. This is a concept that advanced musicians should be taught, not beginning or intermediate musicians. So because of that, beware and as you continue to read, let your brain trickle in with great thoughts and great ideas.
And if this concept intrigues you and you are very interested in it, then I implore you to fill out the form to take a $1 piano lesson in Tulsa so that you can indeed be successful with this concept. So now the big reveal today we will be talking about modes and obscure scales. Commonly, instructors will introduce the topic of these scales during piano lessons Tulsa. However, modes are the biggest confusion and strange, weird, convoluted idea about piano or guitar or any instrument for that matter to the layman. As I tried to describe of what modes are the majority of songs, majority is an understatement. I would say as far as 99% of songs that you would hear on the radio, use the major scale as the basis for the notes that would be constructed for that song. And what that means is the major scale is full of different intervals from the first note to the second note being a whole step.
And from the third note to the fourth note being a half step. And so it’s a series of whole steps and whole half steps that cause these scales to work. And if you are interested in taking piano lessons Tulsa for the purpose of understanding more about how major scales are constructed between whole steps and half steps, then again just fill out the form, schedule your first $1 lesson so that we can talk to you more about it so that you can easily understand it in less than 30 minutes.
So because of that, first we have our major scale and then what modes do is modes keep the exact same series of whole steps and half steps. However it just slides that whole step, half step over one note. So what I mean by this is there are seven different modes and they begin and end on different notes within a major scale basically is the easiest way to understand it. And if you are thinking of the c major scale, the c major scale uses all of the white notes.
So the very first mode that we would use is Dorian as opposed to the c major scale and Dorian just starts on d and so you would play all of the white notes starting and ending on d. This is typically the first mode introduced during piano lessons Tulsa. So you would play d, e, F, g, a, B, c lastly ending on d as opposed to the c major scale, which plays all of those same notes, but it starts on CNNs on c and that’s what modes do. So you could do the same thing. You can play all of the white notes starting and ending on e, and then you could go to f. Lastly, you could go to g, you can all of these different ideas of playing these modes, but the whole point about it is that it really is not going to make you a better musician. There are many different things that you could place your thoughts and your practicing more involved in as opposed to trying to understand modes because modes in and of themselves will not make you a better musician by understanding modes.
It’s not something that you are going to incorporate and throw into your song that you are trying to play like teardrops on my guitar from Taylor Swift you’re just not going to use modes. It’s just not going to happen and because of that there are different techniques that are much more valuable to beginning students and honestly even intermediate students that will benefit them more about talking about than it would be to talk about modes and so this is a big frustration of mine for instructors who introduce advanced content way too early during piano lessons Tulsa. It’s just not beneficial to the student in their current progress. I am not saying that modes are unimportant and nobody should ever talk about modes because modes are absolutely incredibly useful. If you are a solo musician, if you play so those and you shred on the guitar using modes is going to take your solos to the next step.
It is absolutely a very, very interesting concept that can help you as a musician, but it’s not going to make the beginning student any better. It’s not gonna make a intermediate student much better, and that is why I believe it is much more important to talk about the different concepts to the intermediate guitar player or the Intermediate Piano player that can use these concepts better. Typically, the reason that a instructor would pull out modes for a student is not because the student is ready for it. There’s usually one of two reasons why an instructor pulls out the concept of modes. The first is because they have nothing else to teach and they know enough about modes to teach it. They don’t know what to teach the students. They have no idea how to make that student a better musician. So the only thing they can do is throw out ideas and concepts that really doesn’t even apply to what the student is learning.
The second reason is because perhaps the student did some research, they heard about these really interesting and psychedelic ideas for their musicianship, and they’re called modes. And so this may intrigue the student to think that they’d like to know more about modes, and that’s perfectly, perfectly fine. One thing I would suggest, and this is something that I do tell my own students during piano lessons Tulsa when they ask me about modes. I explain it pretty much exactly like I did in this article, which is we can talk about modes, we can make sure that you are interested and intrigued and that all of your thoughts and ideas and concerns are being met. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s just not something that you are going to benefit from at this moment. However, we can talk about it, and at the very least we can talk about the basics of it and how that all works with playing the piano.