Duration: 4:11

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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 one started off as a shaker rhythm. I thought to try and make something out of it, so I tried a few things outside of my comfort zone.

A bongo drum rhythm. This one was set to play 8th notes, while skipping the second note for every set of four.

A steel guitar strumming rhythm, to set up chord notes. A steel drum was setup to play on top of this, also following chord notes. At this point, I decided upon a D Dorian song with a key progression to go i-ii-III.

A clean guitar was then added along to play a lead, with a whistle acting as a supplemental lead.

The shaker originally made me think of a beach theme, so I thought to try and bring out other instruments to emulate that feeling audibly.