Originally, I thought I could keep up with my Exercise of the Week lesson, but I just don't have the time to be doing that on a weekly basis. So here is a toned down version - the Exercise of the Month. You can expect to see quite a wide variety of exercises here that will help you in many areas of your playing.

I am not a huge music theorist, but I have a fairly general grasp of the important concepts. One topic I have always found interesting is scales and modes. I just don't think theory can do it justice. I think once scales become ingrained deeply enough in your playing, that your ears will be arriving at the same conclusions that theory will tell you and then some.

While working on a new song (not posted yet), I noticed that the modes from 2 different keys seemed to work equally well with the backing tracks. Turns out these two keys were a fifth apart. Any book on theory will tell you about the Circle of Fifths and how musicians often use it to cycle through keys. I had always been intrigued about it but never consciously put that bit of theory to use. But I (and you) do not need that bit of theory because it is common sense. Any 2 keys that are a fifth apart (such as C and G, or G and D, etc) only differ by one note (also true of keys that are a 4th apart - note that C to G is a fifth, and G to C is a fourth). So it makes sense then that for almost any song in a given key, you can choose a key that is a fifth or fouth apart and use scales in those to play lead. Chances are it will make your playing sound more harmonically interesting as opposed to playing strictly in key. So the next time you come across a song in say, C Major, think of it as G/C/F Major, because from C to F is a fourth, and from C to G is a fifth. Think of C in this case as the pivot note. Then go above it by a fouth and a fifth to arrive at F and G.

Let me just say a little more. If this sounds confusing, just skip to the exercise! Since every key has 2 other keys a fifth and fourth apart that differ by only one note, then every mode has what I would call 2 "neighbor modes" with which it differs by only one note. In the case of Major, these neighbor modes are Mixolydian and Lydian (i.e. G Major differs from G Lydian and G Mixolydian by only one note). G Lydian goes with D Major and G Mixolydian goes with C Major. So in the case of G Major, we think of it as D/G/C Major. So if the 3-note-per-string mode shapes in my Diatonic Scales lesson are well ingrained in your head, then you should have no trouble switching back and forth amongst similar shapes. The exercise that follows has you doing just that (though just switching between 2 shapes to keep things simple!).

Here we see a G Major scale, with root note shown in purple. We can replace the F# by F (the green notes) and we have the familiar Mixolydian shape.

This exercise in meant to reinforce how similar these two scale shapes are. In this exercise, you start out ascending on a G Major scale, then on the descent you switch to the G Mixolydian shape. You then ascend with the Mixolydian shape and finish the exercise off by switching to the Major shape and descending.

Once you get the hang of this, then add the G Lydian shape to the exercise. But more importantly, just take away from this exercise that by recognizing similar mode shapes, you open yourself up for more creative lead possibilities.

Note: I recorded the audio without a click, but afterwards I tried to add a click to it that fits well. So as you listen, you may find the audio drifting away from the click. The slow file is about 60 BPM as triplets, the medium is about 100 BPM as sextuplets (6 notes a beat), and the fast is about 140 BPM (sextuplets).