My first riff analysis ever

So, let’s take a look at this bunch of notes from a song, I’m trying to learn. For almost a year now. Yeah, that’s embarrassing as heck, I know. It has a , that totally example of what could be called “power chord music theory”. The .. you can rather easily introduce accidentals and even short temporary modulations, just by playing the notes of a scale in form of all power chords. Let’s take a closer look at how it happens.

Functionally, this is a bridge between a verse and a chorus. The phrase starts with a fifth (dominant) step of the scale, which is quite a conventional way to start building a bridge section. There is also a tiny rhythmic detail, that caught my eye here. Notice, how the same 8th note, and the opening fifth steps last not 8 notes, but in fact 9 notes, introducing a subtle rhythmic offset. If this, was, for example, programmed within visual MIDI editor or something, we would have natural tendency to arrange those notes in symmetry,putting 8 bars of B, and change the step with the first note of bar 2. After this, second bar for the most part just smoothly descends us through the steps of the scale, starting from the submediant (VI) back to the tonic (E). And they are all diatonic notes, up to supertonic II. The second chord of minor scale should be a diminished chord. However, we are playing this line in all power chords, so, an accidental C# is introduced here. This accidental spices up the sound of this progression a bit, and can be also viewed as a note from corresponding melodic minor scale.
This is how you can easily overthink 2 bars of power chords into a wall of text.

Note 1: On the sheet music illustration above, the chord symbols show implied chords by the function, not the actual chords played in piece Note 2: The original key of this song is in fact Eb minor, but I’m too lazy to re-tune my guitar, so I just transposed it (if you are interested, what kind of nightmare is transposing a piece of music in MuseScore, you can read it here).