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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.

Originally, this started off as an attempt at trying to emulate the Ace Attorney "Questioning" themes - in those games, there are periods where you're trying to solve the mystery by picking apart any discrepancies or lies with witness testimonies. I wanted to emulate that idea and create my own music here.

So, I tried my hand at it - this attempt used a heavy use of a pedal hihat and a low vibraphone to create that sort of mystery sound, and I decided to use C Dorian as a basis to set up that mysterious sound that I wanted to go for. To go for more of a film noir route, I used held fretless bass notes to set up some form of chord progression throughout the track.

Since I had film noir in my mind, I thought to try and create a leading melody based off of that idea, so I built a melody a piano on the lower registers in attempt to emulate that sound. I built the melody off the rhythm established in the vibraphone for each section of the track and went from there into an ABAC format.