I’m going to share another fleshed out demo with you in this post (if you just want to hear the song, scroll down to the very end). And just to clarify the title of the post, although these don’t have vocals yet, they will eventually — these are not written to be instrumentals. I wanted to post them without vocals to let you in on our writing process. Once there is some music, then lyrics and melodies are written for it.

The Story

This is a song that I wrote quite some time ago. It actually started out sounding very differently than it does today. Originally, I was playing around with the blues shuffle riff you often hear in classic rock songs.

Blues riff - tablature

An example of this kind of riff is in the verse of Aerosmith’s “Write Me.”

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I was thinking about how it was really difficult to make it sound good in hard rock music, unless you’re going for a strict classic rock sound — it just sounds kinda goofy and dated, otherwise. I wanted to find some variation that sounded better to me. So instead of walking between the fifth and sixth, I decided to use a chord progression that moves between the vi and the I chords, and walk between the octave and ninth when I was on the vi chord and between the eleventh and twelfth when I was on the I chord.

Blues shuffle variation - tablature

I thought this was really cool for a while, and demoed it with a previous band:

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But eventually it started to sound dated, and maybe even a little cheesy to me.

Inspiration: Megadeth

Dave Mustaine - Megadeth © Time Inc.

But I really liked moving between the vi and the I chord (B flat and D, respectively, in this case). Also, as you may know, I’m a huge Megadeth fan, and one thing that always stuck with me was when Dave Mustaine pointed out that he liked to play an inverted fifth, so that the chord’s root was on the fifth (A) string and the chord’s fifth was on the sixth (E) string.

I ended up using that a lot over the years, and sometimes you just add that lower fifth to a regular power chord to give it some depth (especially when you don’t have a bass player in the room, as I often haven’t!).

So, I decided to vary the rhythm slightly, dropping some notes, and change the chords up a little, based around the idea of the inverted fifth.

Also, by using the inverted fifth, I was able to change the key of the song to minor, so it’s now in D minor where the main riff moves between the VI and the i chord.

I wrote a bridge and a new chorus – although I don’t really recall where those ideas came from, other than I love using jazz sixth chords with the sixth in the bass position (C6/A in this case).

The Demo

Well, here it is in its current form. There aren’t any vocals yet, but take a listen!

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