Duration: 5:28

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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 started this piece writing a piano chord creating a rhythm writing the 1st and 5th note, followed by the 3rd and 7th. The rest of the song followed off of that concept after establishing a rhythm.

The drums followed, and learning from my cover with Super Mario World's Castle theme, I also created a bassline with sections starting on the 4th beat of each bar, and extending into the 1st beat of the next bar.

For the melody, I wanted to create an AABA format track in the key of F Lydian, and set up a quick motif with descending notes. I originally thought to double up notes with a singular instrument, but decided to pair up an accordion and bandoneon instead for the main instruments.

Because I thought the last A section may sound a bit repetitive, I thought to bring out a jazz guitar to play the chord notes on top of the piano, and playing both lead instruments on the B section and the last A section.

The B section would also be playing a different set of hihats to also make that section stand out more.