Diatonic chords from the C major scale:
The diatonic modes:
The diatonic modes on the circle of fifths:
The white-key modes on the circle of fifths:
I’m making these by screencapping the aQWERTYon and the Scale Wheel, doing minor image editing with Pixelmator, and animating with Tumult Hype and gifmaker.me. I’m taking requests for more gif ideas too!
Thanks for making and posting these. While I’ve been thinking about music theory for quite some number of years, I learned something new (or at least had a new observation) from just a moment looking at your first gif: what stood out was the the bilateral symmetry of both the maj7 and min7 chords, in comparison to the asymmetric half diminished.
You know what’s hilarious? I’ve been drawing these diagrams for years, both by hand and on the computer, and I never noticed the bilateral symmetry until you just now brought it up. This is why I post things on the internet!
I have both enjoyed and learned a lot from your discussions of scales, chords and harmony. I am familiar with the circular scale charts that you present, but I do not know the meaning of the colors. In the major scale, why are 2, 3, 6 and 7 green, while 1, 4 and 5 are purple? What is the significance of some modes having two colors while others have three?
The colors refer to interval quality over the root. Purple is perfect: unison, octaves, fourths and fifths. Green is natural, major, or sharp. Blue is flat, minor, or diminished.