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Everything from feelgood rock to funk gets better with Mixolydian
If you’ve ever found the major scale annoyingly happy but the minor scale too moody, do we ever have something for you this month. Mixolydian is a sound you already know: the intro and verses of Sweet Child O’ Mine, the outro of Hey Jude, and the main sections of Coldplay’s Clocks all use it. It’s got more attitude than the major scale but it’s less dark than the minor, in the goldilocks zone for countless memorable songs without too much schmaltz.
Technically, the Mixolydian scale is the same as the major scale, but the 7th note is lowered by one semitone (one fret). Two great songs for demonstrating the Mixolydian sound are Kool and the Gang’s Celebration, whose horn riff starts on that minor 7th and works down to the root, and The Cult’s She Sells Sanctuary, which has a constant drone of the root notes so you can hear how the other notes harmonise against it. The most important notes are the major 3rd and minor 7th. It’s that unusual combination which makes the Mixolydian sound so distinctive. Those notes also appear in dominant 7th chords (E7, G7 etc), so Mixolydian works perfectly over them.
In blues-derived music, it’s common to play the minor 3rd against major chords, often pulling it slightly sharp with a blues curl. AC/DC often play Mixolydian chord progressions with pentatonic melodies, blurring the lines between major and minor even further. Our examples demonstrate the ‘pure’ sound of Mixolydian by using only major 3rds throughout, but you can get a raunchier sound by experimenting with minor 3rds. Example 5 uses the dominant pentatonic, which is like the minor pentatonic but with the minor 3rd raised one
