Duration: 4:07

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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.

A common issue I've found myself doing and being critiqued about is putting too many notes in one place, as I have this tendency to want to fill everything in.

To that end, I started off with a piano chord setting up a basic rhythm and a bass guitar playing a melody inbetween each piano chord. I also added strings were in the middle sections to additionally highlight the chord tones. To also add to the initial idea of the track, I also held back on the drums.

A clean guitar was chosen for the lead since I wanted things to sound less frenetic than my earlier pieces and just something a bit more laid back. I wanted to double up on the instruments when the music progressed further to really emphasize movement through the track. I also added slight countermelody throughout the piece when the instruments were doubled up, except for during the transition pieces.