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The Other
Three

by Jim Ellis · founder of Fretprints

You can recite every mode and still sound like you are running exercises. Hearing them is a different job — and a smaller one than it looks.

Over any seventh chord in the key, four of the seven notes are the chord itself. Whatever is left is always the 9th, the 11th and the 13th. You already hear the arpeggio. The work is the other three — three notes per chord, not seven.

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Four pages. The four-and-three split, the seven modes folded into four patterns, and a practice loop you can run tonight.

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Four and three

Take C major and the chord built on its first degree, Cmaj7. Seven notes go in; four of them are the chord. Sort them and nothing is left over.

The chord — four notes

CrootE3rdG5thB7th

The other three

D9F11A13

This is not an observation about C major, it is arithmetic. A seventh chord takes degrees 1, 3, 5 and 7; that leaves 2, 4 and 6, which are the 9th, 11th and 13th an octave up. Seven splits four and three every time, in every key, on every chord in it.

336 combinations of collection, key and chord checked while the guide was written — major, harmonic major, harmonic minor and melodic minor, all twelve keys, all seven chords. No exceptions.

Seven modes, four patterns

Name the other three on each chord of the major scale and the seven modes stop being seven separate things. Three of them share the plain pattern — natural 9, natural 11, natural 13 — and they turn out to be the I, the ii and the V.

	Chord	Mode	The chord — four	The other three
I	Cmaj7	Ionian	C E G B	9 D 11 F 13 A
ii	Dm7	Dorian	D F A C	9 E 11 G 13 B
iii	Em7	Phrygian	E G B D	♭9 F 11 A ♭13 C
IV	Fmaj7	Lydian	F A C E	9 G ♯11 B 13 D
V	G7	Mixolydian	G B D F	9 A 11 C 13 E
vi	Am7	Aeolian	A C E G	9 B 11 D ♭13 F
vii♯	Bm7♭5	Locrian	B D F A	♭9 C 11 E ♭13 G

The three highlighted rows are identical in the only way that matters here. Lydian is one alteration away from them, Aeolian is one the other way, and Phrygian and Locrian share a pattern with each other — so on those two it is the chord that tells them apart, not the note collection.

Which is the useful version of advice you have already been given. “Start with the two, the five and the one” is not a shortcut around the modes; those three chords are the ones that sound the plain pattern, so learning them first means learning one sound and getting three chords out of it.

28 → 7 modes across the four collections, folding into seven distinct patterns. Major folds hardest, to four. Harmonic major and harmonic minor do not fold at all — which is the honest reason to leave them until later.

The same note, two jobs

Here is the thing that makes the practice worth doing, and it is one note.

Over Cmaj7

F is the 11th

A half step above the 3rd. Land on it and sit there and the chord objects.

Over Dm7

F is the 3rd

The note that makes the chord minor. Land on it and you have said exactly what the chord is.

Same note. Same seven notes in the key. Nothing changed but the chord underneath, and the note’s job reversed completely. That is the whole argument for practicing against a chord rather than up and down a scale — and every one of the seven notes does this, each one a 3rd somewhere and an 11th somewhere else.

It is also the real answer to “the scale didn’t work.” The scale was fine. The player was still listening from the I chord while the band had moved to the ii.

What’s in the guide

The four-and-three split, and why it is structural rather than a rule of thumb.
All seven modes of the major scale as four patterns, with the chord each one belongs to.
The 28 modes of the four collections folded down to seven patterns, so you can see which ones are worth your time and which can wait.
The 7×7 grid: seven notes across, seven chords down, every cell showing that note’s job on that chord. Everything above is read off it.
The role reversal for all seven notes — each is the 3rd of one chord and the 11th of another.
Which extensions sit a half step above a chord tone, and the two modes that have none at all.
The practice loop: chord, then the one note, then the chord again — the thing that moves a mode from something you know to something you hear.

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Every musical example in the guide is original. The chord spellings, extension labels and pattern counts were computed and checked rather than recalled. No melody or transcription of any copyrighted composition is reproduced. More lessons, play-alongs and practice tools at fretprints.com.