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.

Recently I've been looking back into the Royal Road chord progression, popularized by a lot of Japanese media (but also the infamous Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up" also known as the Rickroll). That's a chord progression of IV - V - iii - VI.

So, I decided to give it a shot myself here - I set up a chord progression with a guitar to have a slow strumming going on, and to give it a bit more of a melancholic feeling, having a ride cymbal playing in the background. The rhythm the cymbal plays ended up being the main pulse rhythm of the track to follow.

One of the other experiments here aside from the Royal Road progression is setting up a polyrhythm, in which I tried variations of 2/3 and 3/4 (or 2/3/4 which I'm aware is likely a no-no) in regards to playing a different yet similar beat with the bass guitar and clean guitar. The bass guitar mainly played a pedal tone in the current chord throughout the track.

I added beats for the drums to also support the idea of a polyrhythm being set up, and set up for an ABC song structure, with the C section being a reprisal of the A section, adding instruments as needed for each. I mainly wanted to set up a motif and have it played throughout the track, also supported by the polyrhythm.

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