What other scales sound good in alternative rock music. or just rock in general?
thx
Beyond Aeolian you can take a look at Dorian mode - good in a minor context most of the time - and the Mixolydian mode, which sounds good over X7 chords. A great tip is to mix Mixolydian with the Blues scale.
"As polyphonic music replaced mediaeval monophonic church music, the folk modes added by Glarean became the basis of the minor/major division of classical European music, the Aeolian mode forming the natural minor mode. However, it would not be correct to refer to any piece in a now-traditional minor key as being in the Aeolian mode, which would imply that the style of the piece was modal, which is usually not the case with music in a minor key as understood today. In particular, the main (but probably not only) difference would be that the minor-key piece would frequently use the raised 7th degree as its leading note, particularly in the use of dominant-7th harmony, whereas the Aeolian piece would rarely or never use such a raised leading note, and its dominant chord would be a minor triad or minor triad plus minor 7th."
Good point about modal music. This is the reason we have those different names.
Writing down the notes we can see they have the same ones. This happens for other scales.
As example, Phrygian dominant can be called also Jewish scale or Spanish gypsy scale.