Duration: 4:01

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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.

With this piece, I originally thought about doing a cover of pieces from Final Fantasy Tactics - particularly Battle on the Bridge and Run Across the Plains. However, I noticed I liked the bass rhythms in the pieces and thought that I could translate that into a more original piece myself, so I built this based off of both of those bass rhythms and playing at a different tempo.

Since the original pieces were fully orchestrated, I thought to try my hand at orchestrating as well here by using a combination of low brass, strings, and a picked bass to play the low register for these rhythmic bass sections. I had decided at this point to make it either an ABAB or ABAC format for a song. I then also created drum sections to play alongside the bass pieces, having the kick drum match the beat of the bass while having a hihat setting up a pulse for each section.

I had separated the bass sections by 5ths so I wanted to make sure that the chords could be easily heard, so to help add more energy to the high tempo, I put in a distortion guitar to play the chords as guitar riffs throughout the piece, matching the hihit pieces for each section. I also created a high register electric piano arpeggio to highlight the chord notes on the high end, also following the hihat note hits.

Afterward, I created a melody to follow the chord notes of each section. With all the chaos happening with the orchestration, I thought to keep the melody simple and following the chord notes to help keep something stabilized especially regarding the movement all over the piece.