Ambient Solvej von Malmborg
Bogland Sunrise

Task at hand: Creating music from digital synthesizer sounds, using no presets. One sound had to be inspired by a sound made by somebody else.
Solution: I used Retrologue 2. As a first step, I made a composition using only its "Init Retrologue 2"-sound - a simple sawtooth sound, enging up with a pad, an arp, and a lead. After this, I went into the synth settings and adjusted them so that each instrument got an individual sound. I also added an alternative lead sound. This was when I decided to title the piece something with "sunrise", and this guided me in the next steps: I added the whistling birds in the second part. The final step was the frog/duck-like sound in the second part. As inspiration for this, I picked a sound from the beginning of Daft Punk's "Short Circuit". After trying to mimic the sound, I added reverb so that it would blend in better, and tampered with the settings a little bit to make it sound more like an animal sound.
Learnings: I learned a lot about programming synthesizers such as Retrologue 2.