Duration: 5:46

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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.

The first step I had upon setting this up was to set up some sort of rhythm. I decided to use a similar arpeggio rhythm I had used prior attached to a guitar, and built elements on top of that:

A hihat sequence to match the arpeggio. At this point, I decided to write an ABABC format song, with different arpeggios for each.

A simple kick+snare sequence with some slight snare fills to signal the end or start of each section, and an acoustic bass to play on top of this.

A slap bass to play on every beat of the bar, which was matched with a piano on the high register also playing chord notes on top.

This was then written in B Phrygian and decided to write a few motifs throughout to use for the song.

The song itself I wanted to repeat itself for A and B sections, just doubling up on the "main" melodic instrument for the reprise of each section, while the third C section introduced a french horn for more variety on noise. I definitely wanted to focus more on the loopability of this track, even trying to create a sort of bridge at the end to ensure that the loop ends up smooth as possible.