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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.

I mentioned in a previous video that I wanted to see if I could try my own take on a pokemon song. This wasn't quite it, but it started off as an attempt at it.

One of my favorite recent tracks from Pokemon was "Battle! Zinnia" and it's also one of my favorite pieces that came out of Smash Ultimate. As a result, I wanted to try and emulate what I liked out of the piece. An element that popped out to me right away was the driving bassline matched with the drums to create that sort of intensity that a battle would demand.

So, I built this track based on that foundation. A bassline was established and a heavy kick drum was added to play on top of the bass notes. A piano to set up the chords were also added to emphasize the chords while incorporating the aforementioned intensity, and an E Phrygian 1-2-1-3 chord progression was chosen to help supplement that.

To further try to emulate Zinnia, and because I felt I was getting out of my comfort zone, I chose strings and woodwinds to help play the main melody. Castanets were chosen to create a rhythmic pulse in the main sections, while hihats filled in the empty space during the transitions for each section.