Cracks at the beginning and the end are supposed to be there, it's not a glitch or anything, so don't throw away your headphones.

Phew, that was a wild ride. Doing a track in two weeks? It's totally not like I have done that before! (more details 'bout that... some time soon) But seriously now, I have to admit that having a deadline really made me much more focused, if not more productive - despite being on vacation the whole time (so I am thankful to Caustic for being such an amazing mobile DAW)! Well, maybe I should then also apply this lesson to game dev and try participating in a game jam?

So immediately after doing a short celebration with my family when I found out that I got shortlisted, I finally unleashed my experimentation powers. Eventually I settled on a pretty nasty lead (btw, I absolutely love foldback distortion) and a bass that produces really interesting cracks at the extreme of phase modulation (those I put a disclaimer for) and made an intro out of them. As for the first verse, I really wanted a guitar part, but neither had I one handy, nor was I able to record one with Caustic's lack of audio clip support, so I simply synthesized one and it sounds close enough.

At this point the song started to sound quite westerny (and my mind just kept giving me images of McCree from Overwatch), so I came up with the final title surprisingly early - oh, and I got the idea to use the word 'Waltz' actually because the song was in 3/4.

And after that I simply expanded the song (I even added a part that was made to sound like a waltz), got into a few arguments with my "testing group", made some late changes and tweaks, worked on the mix and here am I now - publishing the song with a few hours remaining on the deadline.

During the trip I was reading FL Studio's manual (cause I'm thinking about getting a copy of it) and I came upon an article about mixing. I'm not sure what exactly happened, but after reading it (and watching a few videos about mastering) something just clicked in my mind and I somehow obtained the skill of mixing. Yes, I didn't really know what was I doing with all of my previous works and now that I posses this immense power, I feel like I should try to improve some of my older works... but not now, I've got other things to worry about.

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-621585144/gunslingers-waltz

DAW: Caustic 3, mastered by Bandlab

Image source: https://www.pikist.com/free-photo-xjnpc