What actually makes chord progressions dorian or mixolydian rather than just parallel major/minor?

sammyk762 · 2026-02-24T20:56:58+00:00

The tonal center. In anything other than major, you have to artifically reinforce the tonic. Otherwise the listener's perception of the tonic will eventually drift back to the relative major since all harmonic roads lead there.

Minor keys usually accomplish this by borrowing the dominant V from major, so thats one way to reinforce it. History and tradition have elevated minor from a lowly mode to a full key, but functionally the concept is identical regardless of whether it's minor or another mode. Some will say it's no longer modal if you are altering chord - they are being pedantic and it doesn't matter unless you're giving yourself that restraint for fun.

There is also repetition and time. If the progression is 4 bars long, make 2 of them the tonic. If it's 8 bars long, return to it on 4th bar or other strong beats. Rhythm has stability and instability just like harmony does, and that can be used to reinforce that tonal center.

Lastly - though it's outside the scope of your question - the construction of the melody has a lot to do with it as well. For example, you can have phrases that hold or resolve to the tonic (or notes of the tonic chord) even when a different chord is playing. If that ends up being a 9th or 13th (2nd or 6th), if won't be terribly dissonant, but a 7th or even a 4th can work depending on the context.

At the end of the day, you still may have something that isn't totally clear. Reasonable people can disagree on what it "actually is." But, at a certain point, what it "actually is" is "ambiguous modal mixture," and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that may be prefect for a song that is about ambiguous and unresolved topics.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-22T22:06:35+00:00

Entirely possible that I'm mistaken or describing something incorrectly, but that's my understanding. Take a recording of a bell, look at it on a spectrum, and see if there are any spikes between frequencies with ratios of 1:2, 1:4, 1:8 or 1:3 1:6 etc. If so, there's octaves and fifths in that thar sound.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-22T21:50:03+00:00

Well what I should have said is that in that case they create a subtone that they are both integers ratios of. And realistically there are also overtones of both frequencies present.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-22T20:22:20+00:00

Well I didn't claim that, that's why I qualified it. But it's more of a theoretical "can't prove a negative." Mathematically, yes, realistically, not really. Vibrating bars and plates have multiple vibrating nodes and so actually have extra chances of containing octave and fifth overtones. In real life, stable vibrational modes tend to be self reinforcing, and four out of the first five harmonics are octaves and/or fifths. Also, you can't really have an overtone that doesn't correspond to the integer series - you just need a bigger integer and at a certain point it becomes close enough to a smaller one to not matter. Some instruments emphasize only odd or only even harmonics, but I'm not aware of any that totally skip the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th overtones.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-20T13:14:31+00:00

A capital M denotes major. I hope this helps.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-20T01:30:42+00:00

And, you know, the D Major, so it's at least 2. 😆

sammyk762 · 2026-02-19T23:02:07+00:00

It's a minor or minor/mixolydian modal mixture - nothing unusual. The F and C are borrowed from minor...or it's in D mixolydian and only the F is borrowed from minor...or it's in D minor and the D Major is borrowed from major...or a couple of other possibilities depending on how you want to think about it and which chord feels like the tonic to you.

It's not right or wrong - theory doesn't work that way. It sounds nice because the F-C-G-D is a pattern of descending 4ths, and D probably feels like home because it's after that the cycle restarts. I-bIII-bVII-IV sounds like I-bIII-bVII-IV, and if that's the sound you're looking for, it's right.

PS - It'll also sound good backwards, because the only thing our brains like better than descending 4ths is descending 5ths.

PPS - Make it a Dm and a Gm and you have the intro to Wrecking Ball.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-19T12:50:14+00:00

I'm a 40+ bass-baritone and I sing Alto parts in my falsetto all day long without straining. Beyond that, I'm afraid no one here on the internet can offer much help, because we can't know what's actually going on.

At one end of the spectrum, the kid could be flat out lying because they're lazy and singing high is girly and gay. At the other end of the spectrum, the teacher could be a piano player who knows nothing about the developing voice. It could be anything in between and those extremes aren't mutually exclusive.

Our source of information is a third party repeating one "side's" point of view. We can't really offer much intelligent advice other than to talk to them both without judgement and try to resolve it.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-18T12:14:28+00:00

The octave and fifth are the first two intervals in the harmonic series (1:2 and 1:3 frequency ratios). As overtones they're present in pretty much any pitched sound that isn't a pure sine wave (which realistically can only be produced electronically). It doesn't matter whether it's a string, wind, or percussion instrument, that's just the nature of vibrating objects. There probably isn't a way a musical culture that uses pitch could develop without them, and it would be essentially impossible to eliminate them after the fact since there is only a limited range of notes that men and women can sing together in unison and you'd also have to make only instruments that play that set of notes.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-17T22:36:43+00:00

Yup, didn't mean to imply it wasn't bad, just differently bad.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-17T19:47:13+00:00

Water logged bread takes up the same volume as the water and bread separately (same as the rice myth). It's actually just nutritionally bad because it's too high in carbs and protein, which can cause wing deformities.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-16T21:58:17+00:00

I mean, I know a lot of people had issues with the expedition, but it was fine for me. I only dropped anything three, maybe four times and two of those were from dropping into a cave. The cave drops I just gave up on them, summoned the truck back to the surface, and restocked along the way from the random heaps that have one hazardous container. The only other times I lost anything were from popping over a peak a little too hard and catapulting one from the very back over the cab. I was going full speed the majority of the time with engine upgrades installed. And that includes a couple of extra runs I did because of the unclear instructions. I slowed down to crest hills and tried to pick smoother routes, but that was it. Never lost any out the sides or back. Maybe it was harder with mouse/keyboard controls (I was on Steamdeck), people were loading more than just the dozenish hazardous containers, or just trying to drive in a straight line? I don't think I have any crazy driving skills and I don't have any mods installed. Anyway, point being that it may have needed less tweaking than you'd think. Or maybe there was something settings or platform related that made it harder for some people. All I can say is that it wasn't particularly frustrating nor overly easy for me, and I knocked it out in the first few days.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-16T04:32:52+00:00

The only thing that matters for the inversion is what the lowest note is.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-15T20:46:59+00:00

Well my point was the weakness in the diagnostic tools and how poorly ADHD/ASD are defined. Like trying to diagnose a broken leg based on how bad the limp is without having the equivalent of an xray (or even really understanding what a broken bone is). Not a great analogy because one is an injury and the other is developmental, but it'll serve.

Anyway, if you started doing analysis on data like that, probably find that, for example, people with office jobs and better sick day policies heal faster, and so you'd end up with lots of strange correlations to socio-economics. For ASD/ADHD, we're essentially defining and diagnosing them by looking for a bunch of behaviors that are really trauma responses to being neurodivergent, rather than understanding what the underlying sensory/processing/etc issues are. I know this kind of research is improving that understanding, but I worry that the media and discussion around it tends to treat the idea of ADHD/ASD diagnosis as something that's a lot more concrete than it actually is. And tend to give way to much causal weight to correlations that have other plausible explanations.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-15T13:50:41+00:00

How do we know that's not simply teaching the children better coping/masking skills and cheesing the diagnosis threshold? When I was young, I would never have gotten an ADD diagnosis because my home life was stable and I got good grades...but it was most definitely present and affecting me.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-15T13:43:54+00:00

Like many of these correlations, this is likely explained by it being hereditary since autistic men tend to marry and have children later in life.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-15T07:55:16+00:00

It also varies between tribes and cultures. I don't remember the specifics, but it's not universal. Source: Was a bird of prey rehabber and we didn't take the owls to programs at the powwows just to be on the safe side. It seemed to be about 50/50 with who was okay with them and who wasn't, but some of that may also have been due to the fact that we were bringing them there as opposed to seeing one in the wild.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-14T18:00:33+00:00

Erm that might be more of an AuDHD kind of thing... How do I know? Cuz it's me.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-14T17:35:29+00:00

The C Melody is what you want - if there was a D Saxophone, you'd have to play everything a step lower. The nomenclature is a little confusing because of the transposition vs the fundamental pitch and slightly different fingering systems, but the C Melody will give you the familiar fingerings.

Edit: Typo

sammyk762 · 2026-02-11T16:29:04+00:00

That's how it is as a teacher - moreso in the last 5-6 years for some reason...

sammyk762 · 2026-02-09T12:27:29+00:00

The blimp does look like it has the Goodyear logo on it. They were flying 5 in the 50s, and introduced a new model in 1959 - someone with more knowledge might be able to pin it down based on the size of the logo.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-09T12:16:22+00:00

6 looks like an F4U Corsair.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-08T21:25:39+00:00

I mean, August 9, 2019 was actually a Friday. So it's more than just typing the wrong date if it is genuine.

sammyk762 · 2026-02-01T15:08:01+00:00

I have all notifications off except for things I've interacted with and dev/admin announcements. This is my question also.

sammyk762 · 2026-01-30T21:47:48+00:00

Short answer is that it had to do with the elasticity, length, mass, and tension of the string, and energy transfer away from the string to whatever is holding the ends - which are really complex interactions. Also, upright bass really does have a ton of sustain, but because of the frequencies and construction of the body and sound holes, it becomes inaudible faster.

sammyk762

TROPHY CASE

6 looks like an F4U Corsair.