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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 is written in D Dorian with key shifts into A Minor.

The inital goal here was to limit my instruments for a piece, so I thought to use a piano playing both chord notes as an arpeggio and the bassline, while I had a flute act as the sole leading instrument.

However to add more rhythmic interest, I thought to create a hihat rhythm on top of that, which the piano loosely followed. To help carry interest for the leading instrument, I also created a snare + kick line for the main three sections of the song, which ended up being an ABC format with descending note layouts plus chord progressions. Additional basslines and rhythms for the arpeggio plus the bassline were also established on top of the different drumlines.

As for the lead itself, I simply created a motif that I had play by itself in the intro with two variations and built the rest of the song off of the motif entirely. The main goal was to create enough of a contrast with the C section that it would stand out more, while still sounding familiar, and using that same idea for the resolution of the song once we get to that point.