One Step Back, Two Steps Forward (Original composition)

Released: December 30, 2025

Original composition by Penbu for rock band, inspired by a private piano improv session and developed live on stream.

The piece is so named because of the shape of the first five notes of the opening melody: it takes a whole step back before leaping ahead a perfect fifth (which is admittedly more than two steps, but “three and a half steps forward” doesn’t ring right). This is also the first piece we had worked on the week I quit my job to pursue full-time vtubing for a year, so it is also symbolic of my IRL experience at the time.

Composition-wise, the piece is split up into two major sections, transitioning at bar 73 (2:34) with the small drum solo. The design goal for the first part had the drums, bass guitar, and rhythm guitar change rhythms every 8 bars. The piano and lead guitar each repeat an 8-bar melody twice for a total of 16 bars before switching to a new melody. The two instruments are staggered so that one instrument switches to a new melody while the other repeats. The drum solo at bar 73 punctuates the end of the first major section.

The second section (rehearsal mark I) breaks away from the pattern established in the first section. The piano and lead guitar are now in sync and key changes are introduced to make each 8-bar sentence different, even if the instruments might be playing the same rhythm and melody as the previous 8 bars.

The score was created with MuseScore 3 and rendered with the MuseScore General SoundFont.
The visualizations for the music video were rendered with Aaron F. Bianchi’s LSaO Visualiser.

Links

• Music video
• MuseScore.com post
• Original piano improv session
• Making-of playlist

Downloads

• Full audio: FLAC, MP3, OGG
• Source: MuseScore (MSCZ)
• Score and Parts (ZIP): PDF, MusicXML, MIDI, FLAC, MP3, OGG

One Step Back, Two Steps Forward by Penbu is licensed under CC BY 4.0