What make the modes is where the music resolves… comes to rest… feels at home.
If you take a pool of notes – C D E F G A B – and make the C sound like home, you get the major scale or C Ionian mode (at this point think of mode as meaning way of playing the notes). If you make the D sound like home you get the D Dorian mode.
The same thing is true of the chords built from the scale:
Cmaj, Dmin, Emin, Fmaj, Gmaj, Amin, Bdim
If you arrange some of these chords to sound like Cmaj is the home chord (where the progression comes to rest), you will be playing in the key of C major. An example would be C F G C.
If you arrange some of these chords to sound like Dmin is the home chord, you will be playing in the key of D minor and using the Dorian mode. An Example would be Dmin C G Dmin or Dmin C Emin Dmin.
Another way of looking at it is You can make a D minor chord progression – Dmin Amin Gmin Dmin – and by utilizing the major 6th interval instead of minor 6th interval (B instead of Bb) you can make a D minor progression based on Dorian – Dmin Amin Gmaj Dmin.
