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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 was born from trying to piece together a guitar chord rhythm on top of a bass pattern. I ended up constructing two different patterns for both and creating an ABAC song format in the key of G Myxolydian out of it. The A sections were to follow a blues chord progression, while the B and C sections were to follow a descending chord progression into the Royal Road progression, then resolve from there.

The main goal here was to create something a bit more "folklike" and with the combination of the guitar plus the bassline made me think to try a bit more of a "lighter" drum set to combine with it to create a pulse plus an additional rhythm. Ultimately, I came up with something that sounded a bit comfortable, so I settled upon the title and theme of the track from there, thinking about using this up as some sort of RPG town setting.

So, because I had a theme and instruments ready to go, I thought to set up an oboe and pan flute for the leading piece and to play alternatively into a sentence structure followed by a period structure in terms of song format. I wanted to have the leads interwoven between each other and changing key often enough so that even though the motifs of each section would repeat often enough, I would create enough of a contrast with them that it wouldn't have been too much of an impact on the enjoyment of the piece.

Ultimately, since I did want this to feel more comfortable than anything, I settled upon these instruments and didn't want to add more, since I felt that would have ruined the feel of the track if I did.