Duration: 3:24

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This is part of a daily upload challenge I am putting myself up to for 2024. I am currently a self-taught composer of two years, starting my journey of music theory in January 2022, and I am looking to show what I've learned since then by uploading one track a day for the whole year. I originally started off pursuing this as a means to compose music for gaming projects, especially inspired off the works of indie developers such as Toby Fox or ConcernedApe, however, realistically, I am looking into pursuing it more as a hobby - perhaps looking to pursue composition in a more serious capacity in the future.

That said, I am open to critique of my work.

The DAW that I learned to compose with is LMMS, which I picked entirely because it's free. I have considered options such as FL Studio, Reaper, and GarageBand down the line, though for my purposes at the moment this works fine for what I'm doing.

My music is entirely built off soundfonts which I have shamelessly grabbed from Musical Artifacts. The primary ones I'm working with are the Pablemo 2022, Roland SC-88, and the Arachno soundfonts, which can be downloaded from their website and used in your DAW if it supports .sf2 files - to my understanding, most DAWs should support them.

This came about after looking at the VGM Transcriptions channel, recently uploading another piece from Chrono Trigger, this time the abandoned factory theme (titled "Remains of the Factory" in the channel). The main takeaway I got from that which I wanted to try was a walking bassline that remained consistent throughout the track, with a supporting percussion track.

While starting off with the initial foundation to build from, I created the bassline off of a modified Son Clave rhythm and thought to try creating something of the sort with the chords, and then built the entire foundation off of it - a snare drum roll that remained constant throughout the track, highlighting the Son Clave notes, and a bass drum that did the exact same thing aside from the second half of the track, where it did a modified echo of the snare drum.

A synth bass was added on top of this since the snare drum roll sounded militaristic - I decided upon this to want to seem like some sort of alien stronghold or an invading alien force is marching upon the viewer and something needs to be done before they overrun everything.

Since I decided on an "alien" theme here at this point, I chose two synth pads to play the main melody, and had that holding the main piece down - mostly inspired by the Chrono Trigger source, but also that I wanted the backing elements to carry the piece with the main melody just acting as further background noise.