Exploring Dorian and Lydian Modes

Our 2023 songwriting challenge is to write a song using an unusual mode, or a mode you don’t normally use. For our first episode on this subject, composer and songwriter Jeff Alan Greenway joined us to talk about two specific modes – Dorian and Lydian.

Jeff Alan Greenway is a film composer, singer-songwriter, and pianist from Toronto, Canada. Jeff has created music for a wide range of Canadian and international film projects, such as the New Zealand horror film The Anniversary, the American short film The Window Seat which explores the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, and the Indian feature-length documentary The Secret Life Of Frogs, which won a Nature Documentary Award at the Cannes TV and Media Awards.

We talked about:

• Two ways of thinking about the modes
• The sounds of the seven different mods
• How each mode has different chords associated with each scale step
• How you can flip one chord from major to minor (or vice versa) to start playing with modal interchange
• A good way to play with modes is to look at modulating from Major to a mode that is closest to Major (i.e. Lydian or Mixolydian)
• Thinking about modes in terms of the circle of fifths, and brighter and darker modes
• Guitarists vs. pianists – who wins the fight?
• How jazz and film music makes greater use of modes
• The Dorian song example: Mad World by Tears for Fears
• The Lydian song example: Dreams by Fleetwood Mac