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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 is written in A Locrian. I wanted to try and make something that sounded good in Locrian to challenge myself here.

I started off with the drums on this one and made it start off with a lot of kicks. I liked how this sounded - my first impression is something aggressively in your face, so I just added snares to cover backbeats and hihats to keep a pulse steady, and had the bass play alongside the hihats.

Additionally, I wanted to try something more synth-heavy, hence the use of the electric piano and the synth leads. I especially wanted to make the piano stand out with the high register arpeggios in order to emphasize the chords used on these.

To keep things more simple and to some level of comfort on my end, I've established an ABAC structure here. I tried to make the transitions from each section go as smoothly as possible, though I recognize that I may need work on making the transitions cleaner.

The intended leading instrument is the polysynth, however, I had the backing instruments change key every few bars. I see the risk that this may affect the consistency of the harmony, though this is also part of the experiment with this track. I know that leading elements aren't my strong suit, so I've been experimenting with making them work with countermelodies and playing with different harmonies throughout my work.

Pads were added and structured to not just add extra texture to the tracks, but also to help differentiate each section from each other. I played around with having each pad play chord notes at different pitches/timings so to ensure that things sound different enough to remain fresh while exploring similar territory.