Been practicing the royal road progression more, with the help of my music teacher. Here’s where I’m at right now:
Something that I found interesting while learning this style is that one of the ways that this progression work can work is by only playing notes in the melody that are in the key that we want to be in. At first, I had a note that wasn’t part of the key in this piece, but it didn’t sound like the style at all:
But after changing it to only have notes in the scale I was in, it was much easier to find a sound closer to the style: