Duration: 3:19

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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 was another exercise in trying to create a frenetic battle theme. The theme originally started off by trying to emulate Megaman music with a four bar phrase with a distortion guitar, bass, and a drum pattern. I had the drums and the distortion guitar mostly match each other's beats so to keep up a mostly consistent contour for the song. I'd also decided to switch between A Minor and E Phrygian for the main key changes throughout the song.

Unfortunately, I hit a writer's block and left this on standby for several days.

Revisiting this, I thought to try and take what I learned from trying to emulate 64-era Zelda battle music - to keep with the original Megaman theming I used an overdrive guitar for the main leading instrument. To take from Zelda, however, I added a horn and strings to play supporting harmonies on the low register alongside the overdriven guitar.

At that point, I decided to use an ABACB format for the song and built a melody off of that, using slight changes in the harmonies to differentiate each section. I think this turned out decently well, though I'm combining elements from different songs I've learned from into this - I'm not sure how well those elements mix together, which makes this a largely experimental piece for me.