A great thank you for the information; I did not expect the full list of instruments! Sounds (!) like you went out of your way to provide nice music.
I knew about soundfonts (which I believe you can use in FL Studio? Which I still have not tried), although I never used it. This may be the time, as I was precisely considering LMMS! I shall see tomorrow how this is coming along. I also stumbled upon Magix Music Maker; I may take a look.
I also knew about Beepbox, actually! Nevertheless, I think it may not be so easy to use in a short time frame if you are not a bit experimented as a musician, as you seem to be forced into getting a set of keys at each point. I had a bit of tearing my hair out when merely trying to compose a test for a melody I had in mind (for something totally different, my dream game project) because of this! Or maybe there is a way to have the full span of notes, but I did not see it in the numerous options — I only made a few attempts, but I definitely thought it would be useful to me at least for testing out ideas and possibly composing (although preferably outside of short game jams).
sfxr and bfxr were also already known to me (my various patient research around game creation paid off!); I used sfxr some times, it is definitely useful for prototyping or 8-bit sounding games. I do not think I knew about sfxia, but this is also for sound effects, apparently; hey, maybe you can use these as notes, or create your own soundfonts with them! :) Not at all experimented enough to do this for the time being, though.
By the way, I discovered SUPER-LOOPER (thanks to Elephant In The Room). It sounds awesome even when clicking somewhat randomly, which is a nice feature. ;) Although I guess it has a more distinctive style and is thus more recognisable.
I'm not sure quite where you're coming from, maybe you already have a DAW you're very comfortable with, and all.
I am a programmer at heart, curious for everything but expert at (almost?) nothing, and am a total amateur when it comes to music. X) Progressing slowly but steadily (and thus winning the race?…) in many areas, and I thought I might settle on FL Studio someday since it seems so able, but for now, really in an explore-and-test phase. I really wanted to create my own music up to here, but the time limits (which are supposed to boost creativity, and did in concepts and programming) made me end up lazily relying on good friend Kevin MacLeod…
Anyways, good luck with your first Ludum Dare! 😄
I am sure I will need it. XD Thanks, may the spirit of creativity dawn upon you!
(Speaking of short game jams as a challenge: I tried several three-day game jams where I almost infallibly ran into time problems, and only one two-day game jam, the latter being a semi-dire lesson in how puzzle design requires thinking up the levels as a top priority before almost everything else! Ironically, I still managed to pull it off reasonably for a three-day game jam while designing the 17 levels towards the end — although the core idea and some subtle cases programming are what I am really most happy with —, but had to start too late to get feedback on it; and even more ironically, the only ‘long’ (7-day) game jam I took part in was towards the last day with a very small witty game, which was super well received for originality. From all of this and also from seeing several ‘puzzle games’, I came to the conclusion that managing to design a reflection game that is not a succession of levels could be clever both in terms of time management and innovation. This is the theory, but things may go completely awry, of course. XD)
PS: I forgot to mention CGmusic, which is apparently a music generator (and thus falls somewhat in the grey line of AI-generated content debate, I think), and GXSCC which can make any MIDI feel like a chiptune. (Both discovered yesterday through Total Party Kill.) I will not use such automated generating tool, as I feel this is a bit outside of the do-it-yourself spirit, but it is still interesting in itself.