When I was a lot younger, I composed a theme song for myself. Although I took a couple of years of music class in school, my music notation skills were never good enough to actually get it down on paper, or onto Sibelius. So, I went for several years hearing it only in my imagination, or humming the main theme to myself.

A couple of year ago, during the pandemic, I decided to pick up music composition software and try to arrange the orchestral version that I hear in my head so that others could hear it. I installed Ableton Live and started a project. Unfortunately, like many pandemic hobbies mine quickly lost steam.

It was late last year when I finally decided to set my sights a lot lower. I specifically wanted to have a version of my theme that would be fit to be my ring tone, and so I decided to simplify how I composed it. I have a fairly short but frequent commute on BART, and so I used the time to compose an 8-bit version of my song.

I used FamiStudio to arrange the music, and I found that it was fairly intuitive to get something together. It slowly came together, beat by beat, bar by bar until after about 2 months, I was ready to share it with the world.

Here it is on SoundCloud:

If you’d like to download it and make it the ringtone when I call you, you can access it here

If you’re on Android, you can follow the instructions here to set it as my custom ringtone when I call you

For those of you on iOs, you can follow the instructions here to set my theme as my ringtone.

If you’re interested in composing your own 8-bit theme, you can download FamiStudio for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android.