Duration: 4:50

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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'd wanted to try more interesting chord setups so I began this one by starting off highlighting the 1st and 4th beats of the bar with both a french horn and grand piano, then expanded both to play chord notes as a starter. I added extra notes to create a rhythm afterward.

I also supplemented this with a drum beat - a constant hihat pulse, and a kick/snare pattern that admittedly took a few iterations before I thought it sounded good with the current sounds established with this.

It's at this point where I decided to try making this an AABA format track, so I created a B section based upon the same principles and used a different hihat noise to also make that section stand out more. It's at this point I decided to create the track in G Mixolydian.

The B section itself was built entirely around a call and response format, though I also wanted to incorporate a bit more of a longform call and response into the A formats as well, with the only difference with each A section is that different parts double up on the notes in a different octave.

There was also some extra volume balancing done with each section to ensure that the instruments stood out amongst each other in each part despite the addition of other elements as the track went along, though that should be a given..