Why Does This Sound Good?? Things seem out of scale

Trenchant

Trenchant

yeah huh...
Ok. This song is in E Major as far as I can tell. At least, the vocal melody is. But how come the main chugging riff throughout is based around E, G, A, when G isn't in E major? Now i know things don't always have to be perfectly inline with a scale, but what I'm asking is why does this sound good? Does it have to do more with modes or what? I don't know much about those. But yeah, is it like dissonance. Forgive me if I'm sounding like an ignant fool.

Oh and when I play around on it with guitar it sounds good when I play a D below E, all psychedelic like, so I guess it would be that major scale that drops the last note a half step. But what about that G?
 
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The melody vacillates between E major and E minor; every other bar is in E minor:

[mp3]http://www.bandcoach.org/fp/audio/trenchantExample.mp3[/mp3]

trenchantExample.png


Also of interest is the sustained E and D chords over 4 bars - this is why the D you are playing works, as the chord is already there. This makes it somewhat polytonal, although I am inclined to think of it more as an inverted "chordal" pedal point than a true attempt at making dense polychordal structures.....
 
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...and despite how complex it sounds when broken down into theoretical terms, this sounds very much like "let's jam some boogie rock shit" rather than "let's create an intricate polytonal structure". :)
 
I definitely agree with Krushing here on the groove concept where some random parts of the riff just sound good due to them being comfortably there on the fret-board/spontaneous
 
Why does it sound good? Because you enjoy the vibrations that are going into your ears. Music, and I'm aware that I'm simplifying this massively, is the sound of organised/somewhat controlled vibrations. The typical idea of notes that fit into keys and the idea of consonance/dissonance is only really important if you are learning to make music that fits in with most of the music being made today, which is a fair thing to want to understand.

I enjoy the sound of a plane, the sound of seagulls, the sound of a violent explosion etc, regardless of how they'd be portrayed if you were attempting to notate them traditionally. What I'm saying is that while there's no problem in thinking about the sounds in terms of traditional note organisation, there's no reason why a certain degree of 'dissonance' should sound unpleasant.
 
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By putting an instrument in a distinctly higher frequency range.. you don't really have to follow any rules in relation to what the base is playing. Its all about what emotion you want to convey at this point. In this case, it is creating a contrast of emotions.
 
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