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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 E Dorian - I wanted to expand further off of building a track off of a leading motif first, which I used on repeat throughout the whole piece.

I went with my usual steps after the lead was established, mainly creating a rhythm through the drums and the bass, in which I chose to use a harpischord to act as the bass to play chord notes. I added a choir on the back to add a pad to also highlight chord notes on top.

The hihats mainly follow the 8th note rhythm that the harpischord creates, with the kicks and snares following an alternating set of pop rhythm drum sets.

The lead instruments chosen were just me sticking to my comfort zone, so nothing too out of the ordinary there. I figured that I was already experimenting a lot with the creation process, so I didn't want to go too deep on the experimentation that I would miss the mark instead of creating something pleasing to listen to.

I also created some slight countermelodies inside the leading instruments. While I created power chords with them, I also wanted the piece to be pleasing to listen to on loop - as with a large portion of these other creations - so I had thought that a simple enough countermelody would be both an easy solution while also making the piece more enjoyable on repeat listens.