I came across these solid guitar lesson tutorials on Youtube, presented by user Fake Dr. Levin. In this video, he explains how to form chord progressions from non-standard pentatonic scales. I particularly liked the chord progression he comes up with here (starting at 3 minutes and 32 seconds):
So I started noodling around with it, coming up with a slight variation:
Which then transformed to this brief piano piece I wrote for an upcoming project, rendered using Garageband:
Which my brother – a doctoral student in music composition at the University of Illinois and a phenomenal pianist – then played and recorded on an actual piano, putting his own spin on it:
The final piece sounds nothing like what I originally took inspiration from. But that’s how inspiration should work, right?
Forrest M. Burnson 