With These Exercises – You Will Master The Minor Modes
These final modal exercises will change the way you play the guitar forever.
By taking you through every minor mode, starting with the Minor Pentatonic, you teach your hands how music works on the fretboard – it’s all about intervals!
Once completed, you will see the modes as clearly as a painter experiences colours.
These exercises will teach you the three minor modes as well as the Phrygian Dominant, the Minor Blues, and the Conspirian scales. The master exercise moves like this in every CAGED shape:
- Min Pent – add 2 – Min Pent – add 6 – Min Pent – Dorian
- Min Pent – add 2 – Min Pent – add b6 – Min Pent – Aeolian
- Min Pent – add b2 – Min Pent – add b6 – Min Pent – Phrygian
- Min Pent with 3rd – add b2 – Min Pent with 3rd – add b6 – Min Pent with 3rd – Phrygian Dominant
- Min Pent – add b5 (Blues scale) – Min Pent – add maj7 – Min Pent – Conspirian
When you can play these exercises, in all keys, of course, you can stop this madness and go and play songs instead. As you do, you’ll be able to pull out, for example, a Cm–shaped Eb Phrygian in the blink of an eye.
What about all the other minor scales like harmonic minor, melodic minor, etc?
Take a good look at what you’ve played here and you’ll see you actually covered all 12 intervals. That means you can now put together any minor scale, since you know where every single interval is located, in every shape, in every key!
Improvisation All Minor Modes
As a final test, you could pick a root note, I would suggest starting with A, and then improvising using the Minor Pentatonic.
One by one, start adding intervals so b5, maj7 and you’ve covered the Minor Blues and the Conspirian scales.
Next, go back to the min pent, add the 2 and b6 – Aeolian, go back to min pentatonic, 2 and 6 – Dorian, go back, add b2 and b6 (Phrygian), and then finally change that minor 3rd to a major – Phrygian Dominant.
So just like the master exercises above, do it with improvisation!
When you can do this in any shape and key, you really don’t need to practice any of the minor modes any more, you’ve mastered them.
Minor Modes Master Exercises | Related Pages
Minor Scales | Step-by-step guitar course
Using the CAGED system and the Minor Pentatonic as our foundation, we can build all possible minor scales.
The minor scales course takes care of this in just 8 steps. All you have to do is put the time in, following the step-by-step format.
Advanced Acoustic Course
In the Advanced Acoustic Course, we find huge chord extensions and unique chords using open strings. A few solos are incorporated as well.
Perhaps most importantly, we create 2nd guitar parts for most of these tunes, enabling you to play along with me and the singers as if we were a band.
Minor Pentatonic | Minor Scales
This is where it all starts. You must learn all five positions of the Minor Pentatonic. Without this, the guitar will never make sense,
Using the video lessons demonstrating this in Am, you can move on once you have practised in all other keys as well.
Min7 | Arpeggios
In this first step, we practice the min7 arpeggios in all CAGED shapes. This is easy if you know your minor pentatonic shapes.
Video lessons are available starting on an A. To complete this step, you must play starting on the remaining 11 notes as well.
Guitar Chords | The CAGED System
With traditional music theory, the stave, and a piano, you’ll get easy-to-understand chords but they will not help if you want to play chords on the guitar.
Instead, on the guitar we use chord shapes derived from the five open-position chords, C, A, G, E, and D, hence CAGED.
Chordacus
Spytunes chords, scale, and arpeggio software, Chordacus is a refined version of the so-called CAGED system.
Now available as both a chromatic (original version) and “within a key”, developed with the help of a Spytunes student.
About me | Dan Lundholm
This was a guitar lesson about mastering the minor modes, by Dan Lundholm. Discover more about him and learn guitar with Spytunes.
Most importantly, find out why you should learn guitar through playing tunes, not practising scales, and studying theory in isolation.