https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht-bx7iqgYM
A loooong time ago I created soundtracks for websites & interactive CD-ROMs for various corporations. The mindset was functionally opposite in that case but it was fun to receive a concept for the outcome and then work to match that concept. Tooling could be whatever it needed to be. Pay was calculated by the second, which was new to me. :-)
After painstakingly going through so many samples finding the bad ones I got accustomed to their sounds. I learned the ranges of the orchestra from the ranges provided by the Philharmonia orchestra.
My first attempt at composition was just tossing around notes until it turned into a blob of doom sound which I wasn't really happy with.
I watched a presentation on intonation and got a better feel for why harmonics sound as good as they do.
I watched the Philharmonia's presentation series on Bartok (I'm kind of a fan of Bartok) and got a better feel for where his rhythm came from by viewing the folk dance performances he was inspired by. I didn't end up with a folk dance though. I made a rhythm in F# almost like morse code and it helped me treat the composition like putting meat on the skeleton of the rhythm.
After the melody was complete I was shocked at how bad it sounded compared as a string quartet to the piano version. So I shifted the one note rhythm octaves and forwards backwards fifths to get F# on B. I also ditched strings and did woodwinds and the flute and I think it sounded a lot more pleasant.
That was better but the range of the melody was not taking good advantage of the pallet of instruments I could use.
So it was a simple matter of selecting the notes in the piano roll for the melody and shifting them until they were in better agreement with a harmonic.
The process from start to finish took about 4 hours.