Duration: 5:26

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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 off with me playing around with tubular bells - I had thought to create a rhythm out of it, and ended up creating a Son Clave rhythm out of it. I then added an additional bell to supplement the "high notes" of the tubular bells, while creating an additional rhythm out of a harpischord and a harp to emphasize chord notes.

After adding a drumline and a bassline to support it, I thought of creating an ABACB format for the song, and chose strings, a flute, and oboe to supplement this. I had thought about something imposing and royal regarding the song after the harpischord and bells were set up, and I made sure to use concert styled drums for the drumline here.

While the harp was mostly to stay constant aside from the break in the C section of the song, I wanted the harpischord to play at different rhythms throughout to also emphasize each section differently. I also had the bells played differently to also highlight these things.

In regards to the reprisals of the A and B sections, I doubled up the bass for the A section and lengthened the notes for the B section to ensure that these pieces sounded different enough while also changing the key and instruments played on each.