Originally published July 8, 2014, lightly edited for clarity.
A mode is what you get when you start a parent scale on a different note — each mode has its own distinctive sound and its own use over specific chord types. What are modes? A good and important question. 1st, I view scales as an organizational process for your notes. From a chord scale point of view, the notes you are going to choose to play over a chord are going to come from the scale that is associated with that chord. This suggests that knowing where all of the notes of a scale are on your bass fingerboard is a good idea, right? The visual organization of scale notes on your bass neck is important and helpful, but it is also important to understand what a scale is and why it is what it is in the same way you understand the meaning of a word as you say it. I get into both of those in the number system approach to scales: where the notes live and what defines a scale by its distances from 1. The following video explains what modes are and where they come from. Music theory is one of the fundamentals I teach. For guided study of modes and modal theory, online bass lessons via Zoom are available.
