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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.

I was listening to the Einhander soundtrack and was inspired by the track Bloody Battle. It's an interesting take on a techno track used for boss music, and used for some of the boss fights in the later half of the game. Initially I wanted to try and transcribe it by ear, though I decided on trying to identify elements of it and to compose something in my own style from what I've transcribed. Plus, I immediately identified I don't have the right set of sounds for this so I got to work just picking apart what I felt worked for the track.

So, to begin with, I took a whole set of synth instruments, setting up chords with an electric piano and synth string. I wanted to copy what I identified as the song format, so I set up chords and drums for an ABAC song structure and got to work with setting up drum patterns after setting up the intro section.

Afterward, I decided upon using descending walking basslines for the A sections and chords for the B and C sections. To counterbalance this, I also tried setting up descending notes for the B and C sections for the other instruments, as I'd added a polysynth to supplement the bassline at this point.

As for the lead, I copied the general idea for the A section from Bloody Battle, however I decided to take my own spin on it turning this into a call and response setup with a bass lead supplementing the instruments in the B and C sections.