Duration: 5:23

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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 written in A Dorian to accomplish two things - playing around with the Automation Tracks, something I haven't done enough of in LMMS, and writing another piece in another non-4/4 time signature, this time going in 12/8. The purpose of the Automation Tracks was mainly to modify the volume of the leads throughout the track.

This one was formatted to be in a simple ABAC format, with simple chord progressions for both. I wanted to ensure that the chords dipped into the 6th chord so we could take advantage of that Dorian 6th to really showcase it throughout the track.

Since I was already working with a non-standard setup, I thought to work with heavy synths throughout this, using samples to emphasize "non-realistic" instruments all over the piece. I wanted to have there be a feeling of some sort of descent into something technological - diving into the deep web, perhaps. Definitely a setting where you'd want to be careful about going too deep, while I insert a lot of descenting notes and chords into this piece.

I worked in several techniques to highlight the chords in this piece as well, though I very much like how they were done for sections B and C.