ShadowSD said

[orig][quote]

Modes - This is even more controversial to say, as a lot of guitarists are inexplicably wedded to modal thinking, but modes are a fucking scam. There is one key/scale template - that's it. View it as the minor key or the major key or one of seven modes, depending on where you start - it's all one friggin scale; furthermore when we apply a scale on guitar in a song or play in a given key (same thing, really), the order can be mixed, so therefore drawing arbitrary lines around going from A to A and B to B and so on is seriously retarded, let alone the idea of always going from beginning to end when a scale would never be consistently applied in practice in such a uniform and homogenous manner.

What's really going on is much more simple. When you do a solo, it matters what you're doing when the chord change hits versus when the chord is ringing out. When the chord is ringing out, the rules are more open; anything in key is fair game. When the chord change hits, however, the rules are more stringent; the note you hit has to work with the underlying chord as well. For instance, If the note in the solo ends up being the fourth or the sixth or the chord, thereby changing its identity, then there can be a ugly clash unless the identity shift was intended. If I'm in the key of Am and you play a G (VII) chord, the B in my solo at the moment of the chord change can be followed by ANYTHING in the key of Am as the chord rings out, and all that matters is that I played a note that worked with the VII chord at the moment of that change; if some jackass in a classroom wants to talk about how what I really did right was playing Locrian over the VII chord, they can waste time spouting off names in Latin chasing themselves in a fucking circle. Don't waste yours. Modes have no actual meaning, and not a single practical application that even justifies their existence.