Some riffs I've learned:

In my last end-month blog post, I talked about learning the bassline to They Might As Well Be Dead from Risk of Rain 2. Since then, I actually haven't done much to learn the rest of the song, (i.e. the guitar parts, or the bassline during the solo,) because I got distracted in a very interesting direction.

Firstly, TMAWBD was not actually my first choice of song to learn from the RoR2 soundtrack. As I had mentioned previously, the tabs video for it simply appeared to me by a rather generous turn of the Youtube homepage. The bassline that caught my ear the most was the riff to Köppen as Fuck. Every time I heard that song, especially the very end where only the bass is playing, I just thought "GOD do I wanna learn that"

Having been playing the TMAWBD line, I became very familiar to the sound of the root D note, and I decided to take a guess at whether that was the starting note of the Koppen riff as well. Because of a Youtube comment by Chris himself, I knew that the song was in Locrian, so I just needed the root note for all the intervals in the scale to fall into place.

Turns out, D is absolutely the right note. Although in jokingly trying to play the 1st and flat 2nd intervals on E and F instead of D and Db (because E and F are the two notes of "Into the Fire" from ULTRAKILL), I realized the song actually later modulates up a whole-step to E Locrian, and then finally a half-step to F Locrian by the end.

In case anyone is wondering, the 7|4 A-section riff goes like this, in a pattern of six dotted eighth notes and then two regular eighth notes. 6 threes, 2 twos.

1 7 2 7 - 1 5 6 7 - 4 3 and then 1 7 2 7 - 1 4 5 6 - 7

Of course, with all intervals except the 1st and 4th being flat, on account of the Locrian modality. It's a fantastic riff, even ignoring the prog wizardry of the meter and the mode, it just plainly rocks. It's filled with a great sense of momentum and drive, and it's trivial to call to the mind's ear even if you've only heard it a handful of times.

It definitely needs to be able to do that kind of heavy lifting because it and the B-section riff are the only two phrases that the entire song is built off of. I imagine that consistency is actually the key to how the song sounds so confidently executed despite being written in the scale often nicknamed the "unusable" one of the 7 Greek modes. Consistency acts as a counterbalance to the instability of Locrian's tonality and prevents it from decaying into one of the other modes.

Speaking of the B-section, I can't be 100% sure that I've figured out how that one goes. It's in 4|4 with a quintuplet in the first of the two bars, but I'm not precisely sure exactly what intervals are being hit in the quintuplet's course. I think it may be an ascending 4-b5-b6-b7-4 but I could be wrong. All the notes kind of speed past at the quintuplet bit. Aside from that a good bit of the B-section riff is just vamping back and forth between the 1 and flat 2.

And speaking of the b2, I also was clued into the fact that the Survivors of the Void track "Having Fallen, It Was Blood" is in B Phrygian, and with that knowledge I also learned the main motif from that. Sadly not the actual bass riff, which is sick as fuck, but maybe I'll get to reverse-engineering that one later.

You know what other song is in Phrygian? "New Person, Same Old Mistakes" by Tame Impala! I took a crack at seeing if the root note was also B like HF,IWB, and turns out I was close with that. It's in C Phrygian. So now I know that riff too:

1, b2 1 b7 b6 b7 1 (thrice, then) b3 b2, 1 b7 b6 b7 1