Completely trailed off on this one though and cut the exercise short...
 
"Aeolian: Natural minor. Sad, dark, classical sounding. Great for almost anything really but old school metal and "sad" folk music would be the best descriptive applications. In traditional theory this is your relative minor to the key's relative Major and can be used as your root "I" scale/chord. When you do that your Major (Ionian "I") becomes the third step of your minor key. Now this is even weirder and based on classical theory BUT when attempting to compose a harmony in a minor key it is considered to break the natural modal patterns and play the minor "v" of natural minor as a Major "V" chord. That is what the Harmonic minor is essentially designed/used for. Just that temporary bumping up of the "v/V" to Major status. Try it out. In nat minor if you do a i, iv, v progression all those chords are minor (which, by the way is the same case for natural Major (Ionian) except the I, IV an V are all majors... this is, fraom I can glean, at least one of the reasons why we refer to "Perfect" I, IV and V in both those modes/Natural scales instead of "Major/minor" like the rest of the diatonic steps... er I may have just nereded out a bit too much... moving on)."
 
What I was trying to say was that in nat minor i, iv and v are all minor. In classical composition (and thus a lot of contemporary composition) they turn the minor "v" chord of the nat minor (Aeolian scale) to a Major "V" chord. This is acheived by momentarily switching to the Harmonic minor scale thus breaking the natural modal pattern.
 
Yeesh.
 
lulz
 

More fun stuff. When playing chords or trying to create tension in a solo goof around with the various "suspended" 4ths that appear in each mode. It's another way of really defining the mood of the mode.
 
You know that main riff in Pinball Wizard? The first part of that chug is using a suspended 4th then dropping down to the main Major triad. Try that riff except base it on the natural modes (or the Harm/Mel modes) and see what happens. The Lydian sus4 is particularly interesting.
 
Also check out the 7ths of all the modes which is probably more important than the 4ths. Again it is another highly defining notes in modal theory and quite jazztastic.

7th Chord sequence of a Major (Ionian) scale:
 
I = Ionian = Maj7
II = Dorian = Min7
III = Phrygian = Min7
IV = Lydian = Maj7
V = Mixolydian = Dom7 (Dominant 7th)
VI = Aeolian = Min7
VII = Locrian = Dim7 (diminished 7th)
 
Hopefully I didn't futz that up. Been a while.
 

Fun Fact: If you play the notes that are NOT played/used in the natural diatonic modes it creates the five Natural Pentatonic modes. The notes "between" the notes if you will (on the piano in C it would be playing only the black keys in a modal style sequence like I described for the diatonic modes).
 
That's a crazy little musical math quirk I stumbled upon randomly ages ago. I'm sure it's been observed before but it kind of blew my mind at the time.

Western Pentatonic scales are generally created using the I, III, IV, V and VII of a diatonic scale.
 
If you played JUST those notes of any diatonic (7 note) mode (natural, harmonic or minor) you can turn any mode into very useful pentatonic scales (and there are some interest ones in the harm/mel set of modes).
 
Pentatonic scales remove the more "clashy" notes making them more versatile over a larger variety of chord progressions. I mentioned earlier about learning arpeggiated triads because they are the "sweet" notes. Pentatonic scales are the same but not quite as reductionist (you get a couple extra sweet notes to goof around with but you have to pay a little more attention to avoid sour notes).

Immense posting Beep.
 
I found this video and after years of gathering musical information, it all came together. So many pennies dropped and loose ends tied together. 
 

 
 
 

In my requests for a Chord Track, I've also asked for the Track to denote the mode too, so keyboard shortcuts would help find the root, chord tones and tension/colour tones in PRV. I doubt a Jazz approach will be of interest to the vast majority of users, but I recent stumbled on Modal interchange, and I this seems a far more accessible and useful composition tool for most musicians.
 

Kamikaze
Immense posting Beep.
 
I found this video and after years of gathering musical information, it all came together. So many pennies dropped and loose ends tied together. 
 

Absolutely. It's such a broad, nuanced and complex theory but once it clicks it CLICKS!
 
Just like standard math basics, once the fundamentals are there and you learn the little tricks to manipulate it logically and accurately it becomes second nature. From there you can keep it as simple as balancing your checkbook up to theoretical physics... and it will still always be constant and "correct".
 
Cheers!
 

lulz... been working my way through South Park again (after many years) and I just finished the "Guitar Hero" episode.
 
Kismetically prescient timing.
 
Also...
 

I was playing jazz before it was cool  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
and honourably mentioned