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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 wanted to write something a bit more metal focused, so I thought to try writing something in E Phrygian and heavy on the kick drums. I decided to have a doubled up bass separated by 5ths on top of this to also amplify whatever intensity I was trying to go for.

Since I was going for a rock influence here, I had a distortion guitar play chord notes as frets and backed it up with an organ to play held notes throughout the track. The distortion guitar follows its own rhythm, though I wanted to stress a lot of descending chord movement altogether when moving through the song.

To keep it simple I also kept the track in an AAB format, doubling up on the lead during the second A segment.

An overdriven guitar was chosen for the main lead for the track to add to that metal feel, though I wanted to add a supporting instrument to play alongside the guitar itself. After much experimentation, I ended up deciding on a harpischord to play chord notes on top of the overdriven guitar, while following the guitar's rhythm. I mostly chose the harpischord since I was looking for something that would play on the lower register without being completely drowned out by the guitars and drums.