Duration: 3:33

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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 piece started with me trying to combine a piano arpeggio with several held notes to play chords. I thought the combination sounded fine, so I immediately went to set up a bassline pulse and a bongo to play percussion throughout the piece to set up the foundational parts of it.

To me, this sounded a bit like a reminiscing theme, so I set up a string ensemble to play alongside a pan flute to set up the leading instruments here - I'd set upon an ABAC format for the song here, keeping the general shape of the low piano held notes and bongos consistent throughout the whole song. The main changes I wanted to apply for the backing sections were to change the chord progressions, the basslines for each section, and the the arpeggio patterns for the higher piano register.

The main challenge I had put upon myself here with the leads was to keep the general idea consistent throughout both sections without too many drastic changes. Since this was a theme that made me think about reminiscing, I wanted the song to sound familiar and establish itself as such without introducing too many wild elements, as if you're exploring your own memories while deep in thought.