I haven’t posted here for a while — it’s great to have a reason to come back!

Today at our “Synth Nerds” Discord group, part of our discussion was on modes and how we feel about them. I realized that I had absorbed a lot of my intuition about modes from various videos over the years. So here I will list some of my favorites.

Here’s a video by David Bennett. He teaches music theory from the viewpoint of someone with encyclopedic knowledge of popular music. For every music concept, he can come up with several examples to illustrate it. He’s a little stiff in this video, but when he’s talking about the Beatles he really lights up.

Here’s the video with the mode mnemonic that we were laughing about. “I do pot, leave me alone, Locrian”. The whole video is worth watching, but I fast-forwarded to the most pertinent part.

What is so weird about Locrian in particular? “This is Locrian, there’s a reason that we don’t use Locrian”. You can never feel at home, because the home chord, the tonic, has a messed up note (the flat fifth).

And here’s a group of You Tube friends challenging each other to compose something in Locrian that doesn’t suck.