In this excerpt from Songwriting: Get Your Black Belt In Music & Lyrics, we look at how the musical composition process, and how the use of different scales can effect the feel and mood of a piece of music, as demonstrated by the California thrash metal band referenced here.
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Guest Post excerpted from Songwriting: Get Your Black Belt In Music & Lyrics
EXCERPTS Nr. 2, ON COMPOSING MUSIC:
THE EVIL HAS LANDED – Locrian
Notes 1: excerpt from ”The Evil Has Landed”, by Testament
The song The Evil Has Landed by Californian thrash metal band Testament, from their album The Formation of Damnation, is based on the d sharp locrian scale. The image (notes 1) shows the first four measures of the song. Already in the first second you can hear the lowered fifth scale degree, the character tone of the locrian scale.
If the lydian scale has a dreamy, supernatural quality, the locrian scale carries a whisper of an underworld nightmare.
The perfect fifth interval (formed by the fifth and the first degrees) is gone. In the lydian scale it compensates for the unruly tritone interval (the raised fourth degree), but in the locrian scale, the fifth scale degree is the tritone.
Once called diabolus in musica (the devil within the music) the tritone has a reputation as the black sheep of the interval family. Maybe this is why the locrian scale is popular as a base for songs in the black metal, thrash metal, death metal, and related hard rock genres? As if it didn’t sound sprawling enough, the locrian scale also has a lowered second scale degree.
A tip: