Song Project: RH Piano Riff

Most of my pop song ideas begin with either a chord progression voiced a particular way on piano or some bass line. The song we'll be talking about here falls in to the first category.

I remember when I first started composing in high school, I did a lot of songs that were just permutations of I, IV, V and vi chords (so in C, that would be C, F, G and Am).

I remember one instrumental I wrote in Year 10 (called "Mystical Movements in Green")—that my drama class choreographed a dance to—used the chord progression vi IV I V and in particular was voiced with the vi and I in the second inversion. I always liked the way it sounded.

A couple of weeks ago, I was improvising on my digital piano and took a liking to the following variation:

    III . vi . IV . I V

with the vi and I again in the second inversion. I was playing in F at the time with a driving 3+3+2 rhythm in the right hand, so the resultant riff was:

which sounds something like this:

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This will form the basis for the song.

All material for this project is made available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license so you are free to redistribute and remix with attribution but under the same license and not commercially.