Duration: 4:56

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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.

Here, I experimented with an old industrial sf2 file I picked up from Musical Artifacts. I built two different rhythms from this and decided to mix the two together, using a synth bass to set up a rhythm of 8th notes while also playing chord notes, which were entirely made of sus2 chords. This combined with being written in A Locrian really added to the idea of making something sounding unsettling, like looking into a factory used to design forbidden weapons of war or some sort.

Since I already established that this would be mechanical in nature, I decided to make all the instruments synths in this regard to create that sort of mechanical feel for the music, since none of it would "sound" natural - I'd already decided upon Locrian, after all, so this would just add more to it. I mainly used two chord progressions with an AB format for the music.

The lead itself was nothing too special, I think, I mainly used descending notes and tried to either end on the 5 or the 1 since I wanted to highlight the Locrian sound in the piece. I had raised both leads up to the 4 of their respective scale on the final 8 bars of each section, which I thought would create more interest in the climax of both.

To also add to the unnatural feeling, I added a synth pad to back up the chord notes, while playing on different keys, to aid in the unnatural feeling while also keeping the piece grounded in their appropriate scale.