Mixolydian mode

First of all: Mixolydian is a major scale, in a broad sense. If you show an untrained person a Mixolydian song and ask them whether it’s major or minor, they’ll say major, and it’ll be obvious. It’s not as bright as Ionian but it’s still pretty bright.

Sound-wise, how it’s different from Ionian is that Ionian is more of a sweet and lush flavor of “major” and Mixolydian is more relaxed, groovy, and practical-feeling. You’ll hear this in video game soundtracks where, for instance, your character is exploring a new town in a peaceful green valley. If you’re in Animal Crossing, Ionian is the quiet morning where everything is still waking up, and Mixolydian is the busy afternoon where you’re running all over town doing errands.

Mixolydian is the major-sounding mode without the strong built-in resolution of the V7 chord. It lacks a leading tone, the natural 7. Things will return to I, but without the urgency of the V7 — it’s more like settling back rather than snapping back.

Where do you see Mixolydian used? Rock, first and foremost: this is the king of rock modes. Especially classic rock. And also funk, and in video games, and in pop, and in New Orleans jazz. You won’t find it in classical music much, and I don’t hear it very often in genres which tend to use minor-leaning modes (trance, hip hop, etc.).

It’s pretty vamp-oriented, as opposed to long-chord-progression-oriented, and you’ll often see songs just hanging out on the I7 chord for a while. It has some great two-chord vamps, some great combo vamps, and a long tail of less-common combo vamps. There are songs with longer Mixolydian chord progression — Mixolydian supports this better than Dorian does — and they’ll often be vamps mixed with turnarounds. This tutorial covers the core vamps. Once you internalize what each chord brings you energetically, you'll have the vocabulary to hear what's happening in longer progressions too.

The I chord in Mixolydian is a dominant 7th chord, and I’ll mostly notate it as I7. Mixolydian (in addition to Phrygian Dominant) are examples of what modes sound like when a dominant chord is the home that things resolve to.

Structurally, Mixolydian works quite a bit differently than Ionian (the major scale). The power centers of Mixolydian are v7 and ♭VII. These are what make Mixolydian sound like Mixolydian. They’re both shared with Dorian, but they’re in a completely different context here (major tonic vs minor tonic). They’re “soft” dominant sounds with some pull-to-tonic, but they’re not as strong as an Ionian V7. The I7 and the iii7♭5 form the tonic cluster. And then there’s the ii7, IVmaj7, and vi7 — these are all shared with Ionian, they all work, but they aren’t distinctively Mixolydian, and so they tend to play more supporting roles.

Mixolydian is also a great base mode for modal interchange. The single most common form of this is Dorian interchange: layering a ♭3 over a I7 chord or borrowing a ♭III chord. This is so common that you’ll hear Mixolydian-Dorian blends more often than you’ll hear pure Mixolydian. Also on the darker end, you’ll see a ♭6 borrowed from the Mixolydian ♭6 mode, and both ♭3 and ♭6 borrowed from Aeolian a decent amount. On the brighter end, you’ll often see songs that borrow V7 chords from Ionian (sometimes they do want the tighter resolve-to-I feel after all!), and occasionally ♯4’s from Lydian Dominant. And there are some more out-there, specialty modal interchange techniques that are too rare to address here in these lessons — just know that Mixolydian is a really strong base for experimenting. The fact that the I chord is a dominant chord helps here, because almost any note you borrow will be a chord extension over it.

Finally: Mixolydian is the bright face of blues harmony. Blues harmony will mix several modes, but Mixolydian, with its I7, is a principal member of any mix.