Duration: 4:27

10 views

0

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 originally started off with me playing with walking basslines, and I eventually settled on using a base with a marimba, downward piano chord, and the initial acoustic bassline I was playing around with. I then decided to have a contrabass playing on minor seconds and perfect 5th intervals (was originally working to get diminished 5ths) to have more background bass on top of everything else.

After choosing to write this in A Minor, I thought to create an AAB format here where I'd use a key change into E Phrygian for the A reprise, and then after an interlude, switch to D Dorian before getting the piece to loop itself.

The goal I decided upon after hearing the initial beat was to write something that featured a lot of downward motion and several countermelodies throughout the main melody to create more interest. While this did help, I had also decided upon removing elements of the backing tracks throughout the piece to also create more interest on top of the aforementioned key changes.

Since the general flow of the downward motion and the contrabass helped create a lot of tension in the track, I made a few edits to the piece to make it seem like a dangerous area to be exploring and wanted to add bells to help create more of a feeling of dread throughout the piece.