A Very Scary Christmas Song Jam

I entered another jam, this one I had to make a tune. I forgot how hard composing is. I managed to get it done though, it was a slog. Here's how I did it;

Started trying to find a key to work with, already not easy as Christmas is joyous and celebratory while scary is ominous and dread inducing. I settled on Eb major, turns out you can do both with that key.

First up Musescore. I spent a long time in this program, as this is the 'base' where the melody, bass and whatever come together. After another tough search I settled on tambourine, xylophone and piano.

After filling the page it was a long road to melody and bass, I'm not overly stoked with the result but I made something that sounds sort of joyous and scary at the same time.

Next step was volume changes, a few note moves and export as pdf, png and midi. Next up into fruity loops to get some better sounding instruments, add some eq and some pre-mastering.

The final step for me was getting the exported wav into audacity for some final mastering and volume tweaks. Export as mp3 adding some metadata and it's done.

Here are some screenshots of the process;

The files are CC0 and you can download them here;

a_very_scary_christmas.zip

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