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Willem, I have been playing guitar for 50 years and I still don't know or understand modes. I'm sure Neil and Ness can explain why one might want or need to learn modes. But I will continue to be happily ignorant of modes.

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Some good info there Walt. All of the soloing and leads have always seemed a bit out of reach for me. I seem to come across songs in various modes while transcribing music all the time. I first thought of them as a way to use all of the chords from a certain key, but have them revolve around, or rather, resolve back to something besides the I chord. Say you have the key of C maj... C Dm Em F G Am Bdim... If the song resolved back to F, you could say it was Lydian..

Even the plain old major scale is a mode... It resolves back to I, so it is the Ionian.

I - Ionian
ii - Dorian
iii - Phrygian
IV - Lydian
V - Mixolydian
vi - Aeolian
vii - Locrian

At least all of this is how I understand it so far.

J