A hub for Mark Weber’s musical work and updates.

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The day I tried to write a song in every major mode

Some musical experiments begin with a grand idea; mine began with a spare bedroom, a temperamental MIDI controller, and a flat white from the café below. It was Friday in Brunswick, Melbourne, and the tram outside produced the kind of metallic clatter that later became a hi-hat. I set one rule: every attempt would use the same seven notes from C major, changing only the note I treated as home. That constraint made the project strange enough to remain interesting.

The seven modes built from that scale were Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian and Locrian. I planned to give each one a short melody and basic progression before lunch. The plan was orderly, which meant it lasted about twelve minutes. By the time the AFL results came over the radio, I had already abandoned the schedule and started treating the modes as personalities rather than categories.

The plan began with one familiar scale

At 7:10 in the morning, I opened with Ionian because C major was the safest place to begin. The progression came quickly: C, G, Am and F. I sang a verse about taking the long way home, then added a chorus that behaved exactly as expected. It was competent, bright and easy to picture singing in a band room off one of Melbourne’s laneways.

The trouble was that I could hear every decision coming. A G chord announced the lift, F softened the verse, and the resolution felt inevitable. Ionian gave me a useful reference point, but it also revealed how easily familiarity can become autopilot. The finished take was pleasant enough, yet it lacked the slight imbalance I wanted.

Ionian felt like home

I returned to Ionian after breakfast, this time beginning on an open E string and improvising before touching the chords. That changed the mood. The same notes sounded less like a demonstration and more like someone remembering a good day. I kept the C–G–Am–F progression but made the melody less symmetrical, allowing the second line to settle a beat later than expected.

Even then, the song remained polite. Ionian’s strength is its stability: the tonic sounds secure, the major third supplies direct brightness, and phrases want to return home. That makes it excellent for verses that need to feel familiar. By mid-morning, I had a usable chorus, though the verse still seemed to belong to a different song.

Dorian brought the swagger

Dorian started with D as the centre of gravity, so the progression became Dm, G, Em7 and Am. I added a walking bass line, tapped out the beat on the arm of my chair and let the melody emphasise B natural, the major sixth that keeps Dorian from becoming ordinary minor. A heavier backbeat followed without much coaxing.

Dorian has a reputation for swagger, but its real character comes from balance. The minor tonic can sound mournful, yet that bright sixth keeps it moving. My lyric changed from travel and distance to a speaker who knows they are about to be challenged. The result felt like pub rock with more economy: less ornament than a guitar solo, more purpose in each held note.

The useful discovery was that the mode did not need extra chords to create tension. Holding back the seventh in the melody and letting it arrive later gave the chorus its bite. I stopped trying to make the groove heavier and simply let the notes imply the weight.

Phrygian refused a comfortable ending

Phrygian began in E, with its lowered second landing heavily against the tonic. I tried Em, Fmaj7, Dm and an unresolved E chord, then played the progression slowly on the nylon-string guitar. The F major was brighter than expected, but that clash was the point: it sounded almost cheerful while the underlying harmony remained unsettled.

The melody soon took on a threatening shape. Descending phrases stopped just before their expected landing, and the low E gave everything a cavernous edge. There was a danger of turning Phrygian into a stock medieval or Spanish-guitar cue, so I removed the drone-like bass notes and introduced more space. Restraint stopped the mode from becoming a theatrical character.

By late morning, the Phrygian attempt was the least polished and the most distinctive. Its strength was refusal. Every phrase seemed to question whether the root note would still be there when it returned. I saved the melody but discarded most of the lyrics, which had already begun sounding like characters from a late-night radio serial.

Lydian made the room too bright

Lydian centred itself on F and immediately filled the room with reflected light. Its defining raised fourth, B natural, turned a G chord into something suspended and expansive. The progression moved through F, G, Am and Bm7, while a brief G sharp functioned as an accidental sharp eleventh, creating a small ache inside the brightness.

This was the first mode that felt larger than the room. My original lyric was about a suburban morning, but the melody demanded something more cinematic. I rewrote it around a departure, then recorded the chorus twice: once with acoustic guitar and once with the electronic bass patch turned up. The synth version sounded like a film trailer for a road trip through unfamiliar scenery.

Lydian’s danger is excess. When every note appears polished, the song can become unreal, as though the characters have no dust on them. I fixed that by making the verses narrower and the melody less resolved. The section still glowed, but it now suggested optimism viewed from the edge of uncertainty.

Mixolydian knew where the chorus was going

Mixolydian started on G, and the progression practically wrote itself: G, C, D and Em, with a G7 pushing towards C. The lowered seventh, F natural, gave the tonic chord a familiar opening without the finality of G major. It sounded suited to a crowded beer garden, a Friday band and a chorus sung by people who have forgotten most of the words.

Country, blues, soul and early rock all passed through my head. Rather than imitate any one of them, I focused on the shared lift between a major verse and a dominant seventh. The guitar played clipped chords, the bass walked beneath them and the vocal melody leaned forward whenever the G7 appeared. For a few minutes, the song had an easy communal shape.

The useful lesson was that Mixolydian can feel both happy and unresolved. Its major tonic supplies confidence, while the flattened seventh keeps the song from settling completely. I used the same seventh as both a chord tone and a melodic goal, letting it tug towards C without making the journey feel heavy. That tension became the best part of the afternoon.

Aeolian and Locrian tested the edges

Aeolian centred on A and sounded like a late drive from St Kilda towards the bay, with street lights passing across the windscreen. The progression of Am, Dm, Em and G was immediately recognisable, but the melody introduced enough space to prevent it becoming a stock lament. This was the most conventionally minor mode and, not surprisingly, the easiest to imagine releasing.

I treated the sadness carefully, avoiding a single repeated phrase that might have made it melodramatic. The words concerned ordinary things: an unanswered message, a missing jumper and the particular quiet of a house after someone leaves. Aeolian’s lowered sixth and seventh gave the verses their gravity, while the natural seventh allowed the chorus to reach G without becoming triumphant.

Locrian, centred on B, was a different proposition. Its tonic chord was diminished, so a progression based on Bdim, Cmaj7, Em and Fmaj7 kept sliding sideways. There was no stable home, and the half-step between B and C made even the first phrase sound as though it had been interrupted. I played it three times and quickly understood why Locrian is so rarely used as a conventional pop mode.

Comparing the two recordings clarified the difference between a familiar scale and a mode. Aeolian could support a song because its tonal centre felt emotionally coherent. Locrian was more useful as a texture, a brief unstable colour rather than the foundation. I kept one Bdim stab for the end of the Mixolydian chorus, where it sounded like a door closing.

By early evening, the project had shifted from seven complete songs to a collection of useful fragments. ARIA’s charts and the Australian independent market could tell me what listeners were buying, but they offered no help deciding which fragment deserved another afternoon. Local rules mattered too: a Melbourne laneway performance still involves council noise limits, liquor licensing and neighbours, while ownership and royalties would require attention to the Copyright Act 1968 and registration with APRA AMCOS.

The field notes worth keeping

The useful diagnostic cues were straightforward:

The second set of notes concerned method rather than musical theory:

The surviving fragment was the F Lydian verse, followed by the G Mixolydian chorus. Lydian supplied the distance, Mixolydian supplied movement and the Bdim chord supplied an ending that never quite resolved. I trimmed both sections, repaired the lyric and kept the tram sound buried low enough to suggest the wider city without explaining it.

What I want to remember is that a mode is not a costume; it is a different centre of gravity. Change the note the music treats as home, and the same seven pitches can carry entirely different emotional weather.