Duration: 4:48

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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.

Here's another shot at something simpler, this time I wanted to aim for something of a night festival. Originally I had another setting in mind for when I composed this, which is why I did this in E Phrygian, however, when I did compose the first few chords I liked how they sounded, especially after combining the folk guitar and the acoustic bass in my original pass.

Afterward, I set up an ABAC rhythm and got to work. Since I wanted a simpler rhythm and at this point decided to go for the "night festival" thought, I decided to use a combination of a wood block for a pulse, a taiko drum to set up a rhythm, and a hand clap to break up the sections of the track.

Since I wanted that sort of festival thought to be here, I wanted to settle into a folk side of instruments, so to supplement this for the lead I used a combination of the pan flute and the recorder to support the lead. The lead I wanted to jump between E Phrygian and A Minor to have some interest going on with the key changes and build a bit of a call/response within its own structure. I had the rhythm of the leads follow either the guitar or the taiko drum just to add more emphasis on either of the two instruments throughout the piece whenever they played.