#lsdj
- ROM retuning — patching a tracker's pitch table techniqueOverwriting the block of precomputed pitch values inside a tracker's ROM, so that every note in the sequencer plays at a frequency you chose. It is how alternative-tunings are done on the game-boy , and it is also the …
- 4ntler personGame Boy musician and programmer, author of liblsdj — the library behind the command-line tools lsdsng-export , lsdsng-import and lsdj-wavetable-import for lsdj save files (GitHub repository stijnfrishert/liblsdj , …
- Abrasive personThe person whose idle question started Game Boy microtuning: "can LSDJ be retuned to non-standard tunings?" The answer, in his own account, took "a few minutes in a hex editor and half an hour in Perl" and became …
- bryface personChip musician on chipmusic-org . The wiki knows him from one place so far: the 2013 ghost-channel thread, where he confirms the technique from independent practice and states its cost.
- Defense Mechanism personGame Boy musician and the author of intense-tech , the lsdj tutorial series on defensemech.com (2019–2021, Patreon-supported, with Spanish translations by Pixel Guy). The articles are written from studio practice — kick …
- Hypnogram personGame Boy musician (first name Noah, per the thanks in intense-tech article 03; blog hypnogrammusic.blogspot.com, album XIII on Bandcamp) whose March 2016 post Don't Sleep on Z became, with permission, the basis of …
- Infu personGame Boy musician and author of Getting started with LSDj with Infu (learnlsdj.github.io), a single-page beginner course for lsdj released under CC BY-NC 4.0, reworded and redesigned by Torsten Hansson and tested by …
- Intense Tech with Defense Mech publicationAn lsdj tutorial series by defense-mechanism , published at defensemech.com/intense-tech/ in English and Spanish (translations by Pixel Guy) and mirrored on the ChipWIN blog: 21 articles from 2018-10-11 to 2021-08-29 …
- Johan Kotlinski personSwedish programmer and musician, author of lsdj and its manual (copyright Johan Kotlinski; the v9.2.6 manual is dated 9 May 2021). The manual points to the user-maintained wiki, the LSDj Facebook group and …
- libLSDj toolA library by 4ntler for reading and writing lsdj save files ( .sav ) and songs ( .lsdsng ), released with command-line tools for Mac and Windows (Linux users compile from source). defense-mechanism documented three of …
- little-scale personSebastian Tomczak, chipmusician and prolific tutorial writer, whose 2008 blog post How to: Prepare Samples and Create LSDJ Kits is still the reference the chipmusic-org kit threads point at five years later — …
- LSDj Wave Cruncher toolA command-line tool by Ada, alias DOTCNT (GitHub iLambda/lsdj-wave-cruncher ), that reduces a single-note sample to sixteen 4-bit wave frames — a .snt wavetable — so that the lsdj wave synth plays the timbre at any …
- LSDPatch (LSDPatcher) toolThe Java program (Java 8 or later; GitHub jkotlinski/lsdpatch ) that customises an lsdj ROM and manages its save: ROM upgrades, sample kits, fonts, palettes and — since it absorbed LSDManager — songs. defense-mechanism …
- nitro2k01 personGame Boy hardware and software specialist, and one of the recurring technical voices on chipmusic-org — the person who answers why the chip does that , usually with the register-level reason.
- Pain Perdu personGame Boy musician (first name Paul) and author of Hidden LSDJ Tricks , a six-part video series from 2016 about the parts of lsdj "that are probably in the manual but not necessarily gone over in enough detail, or just …
- roboctopus personGame Boy musician and author of LSDJ & You , a column of intermediate lsdj technique articles written for noisechannel.org around 2013–2014 and, when that site began to fail, ported by hand to a tumblr: "I wrote a …
- Sabrepulse personChiptune artist (site sabrepulse.com, offline by 2026-08-30) and author of a Getting started with LSDJ tutorial for people "who have either very basic or no musical knowledge", preserved as a mirror at Adventure Kid. …
- Tyler Barnes personlsdj musician and tutorial maker who devised and named the ghost-channel — the additive wave trick that gets a second, independently playable note out of the Game Boy's wave channel. He published it on 2013-07-11 as a …
- chipmusic.org — Advanced LSDj Tutorial: The Ghost Channel (2013) summaryThe thread accompanying tyler-barnes 's video tutorial ( s-tylerbarnes-ghost-channel-tutorial ), and the place the name ghost channel comes from. Its value beyond the video is the reply by nitro2k01 , which supplies the …
- chipmusic.org — LSDJ Advanced Tricks thread (2012) summaryA chipmusic-org thread started by a tracker who had "PU1 as a kick, PU2 as the main melody, WAV as the lower notes, NOISE as hi-hat" and ran out of channels. The replies are the Game Boy scene's consensus on channel …
- chipmusic.org — LSDJ Chord Cheat Sheet / Advice on Learning Tables threads (2015) summaryTwo chipmusic-org threads: LazierGunz's chord cheat sheet for C commands and arpeggio tables (an image; the discussion carries the values), and a beginner asking how anyone learns to write tables — answered by herr_prof …
- chipmusic.org — LSDJ FAQ thread (2010–2011) summaryA catch-all question thread on chipmusic-org from the LSDj 3.9–4 era. Beside hardware chatter (cartridge power problems, keyboard wiring, USB transfers) it settles several command questions that the manual leaves …
- chipmusic.org — LSDJ kit creation and kit volume threads (2013) summaryThe community's working version of little-scale 's tutorial ( s-little-scale-lsdj-kits ), in Audacity rather than Peak, plus the thread where everyone agrees the stock kits are too quiet.
- chipmusic.org — LSDJ live performance thread (2010) summaryWhat live mode actually gives you, argued out by people who tour with it.
- chipmusic.org — lsdj wav channel release? (2013) summarySomeone who had used lsdj for a year asks why a volume envelope that gives a release on the pulse channels does nothing on the wave channel. The answer is the frame-envelope method — the wave channel's volume envelope …
- chipmusic.org — Noise snare / Complete Drum Kit on Noise Channel threads (2014) summaryTwo chipmusic-org threads from late 2014 on making drums in lsdj 's noise channel alone, with concrete instrument settings and tables from several members, and the recurring advice that drums are best spread over …
- chipmusic.org — speech synthesis thread (2012) summarySomeone asks whether a three-to-four-minute spoken-word piece is possible with lsdj 's SPEECH instrument. The answers are the only first-hand account of the speech instrument in this wiki, and they are discouraging in a …
- chipmusic.org — two Johan Kotlinski interviews (2012, 2014) summaryTwo short interviews with johan-kotlinski reposted on chipmusic-org : a 2012 e-mail interview for a school paper on Game Boy music history, and a 2014 piece for Devise Magazine. Both predate the longer 2020 intense-tech …
- chipmusic.org — Wav Instrument Tutorials for LSDJ (2014) summary"Specifically I want to create a flute wave instrument, but all the tutorials I find are just about kick drums and snares." The answers are the wiki's best sourced material on articulating a wave instrument, plus a …
- Defense Mechanism — LSDj Learning Lab shorts: Limit and Vshift, Long Filter Sweeps, Self-Resonating Bass (videos, 2020) summaryThree short clips from the wave-channel stream series, each carrying one thing the wiki did not have.
- Defense Mechanism — LSDj Learning Lab: Overtones / Ghost Channel with Allpass Filter (video, 2020) summarySeven minutes of a live stream by defense-mechanism , answering a viewer who asked whether LSDj can do a distorted guitar power chord. It is the 2020 answer to the 2013 hand-drawing method ( …
- Defense Mechanism — LSDj Noise Channel Tutorial (v9.2.L) (video, 2022) summaryWritten because the noise channel was rebuilt in 9.1.0 and the standard reference no longer applied: "there's a tutorial by Bowie Meets Robot about the noise channel for version four and it's really good … but it …
- Defense Mechanism — LSDJ Wave Channel Tutorial..? (More of a ramble) (video, 2020) summaryThe video companion to the Wave Synth Deep Dive articles ( s-intense-tech-01-wave-synth-deep-dive-part-1 , s-intense-tech-02-wave-synth-deep-dive-part-2 ), demonstrated with an oscilloscope on screen. Two things make it …
- Defense Mechanism — Making every LSDJ kick I can think of (video, 2024) summaryA compendium: every kick he can build, one per channel and per method, on LSDj 9.4.0 — the newest version any source in this wiki uses. The project file is offered in the video description.
- defMON wiki — DIN/MIDI/LSDj/Nanoloop sync, stereo SID, manual BPM tables summaryThe defmon wiki's hardware pages: Scannerboy's user-port sync adapter (with the assembly code to drive it from your own programs), the 2SID stereo feature set, and frantic 's defBPM calculator/tables (2013-03-02) that …
- Getting started with LSDj with Infu (course) summaryA single-page beginner course in fourteen sections by infu (CC BY-NC 4.0): setup and emulators, the sequencer, the ENV envelope, commands, three noise drums, a snare table, a wave kick and bass, the synth screen, and …
- Intense Tech #01 — LSDj Wave Synth Deep Dive, Part 1 (Defense Mechanism) summaryThe first intense-tech article: defense-mechanism explains the lsdj wave synth's SIGNAL, VOLUME, FILTER, CUTOFF and Q by way of the harmonic series, and shows how to extract a sine wave — the deepest bass the Game Boy …
- Intense Tech #02 — LSDj Wave Synth Deep Dive, Part 2 (Defense Mechanism) summaryThe second wave-synth lesson of intense-tech : PHASE (and its Resync modes), DIST (Clip, Fold, Wrap), LIMIT and VSHIFT — "how to add some real noisy crunch to your wave sounds", from a silky lead to a gnarly bass ( …
- Intense Tech #03 — Don't Sleep on Z (Defense Mechanism, after Hypnogram) summarySeven worked examples of lsdj 's Z command by defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ), rewritten from a 2016 blog post by hypnogram : random vibrato, duty cycle, panning, gating, melody, chords and a sweep. The article is …
- Intense Tech #04 — Manage your LSDj save files with libLSDj (Defense Mechanism) summaryA command-line tutorial by defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) for 4ntler 's liblsdj tools lsdsng-export and lsdsng-import : listing what is in a pile of lsdj .sav files, pulling single songs out as .lsdsng files and …
- Intense Tech #05 — LSDj Wave Cruncher Instrument Library (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) introduces a library of sample-derived wave-synth instruments for lsdj and the liblsdj tool that patches them into a save: the wave synth "as a rudimentary sampler".
- Intense Tech #06 — Groovy Groove and Tick Tricks, Part 1 (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism on lsdj timing: what a tick is, how grooves assign ticks to lines, a numbering convention that makes G commands readable, per-channel swing, and phrases lengthened with H ( intense-tech ).
- Intense Tech #07 — Groovy Groove and Tick Tricks, Part 2 (Defense Mechanism) summaryMore lsdj groove tricks from intense-tech : slow tables, Hop + Groove combinations, 3/4 time and triplets from grooves, and a two-channel delay made of nothing but grooves ( defense-mechanism ).
- Intense Tech #08 — DOTCNT's LSDj Wave Cruncher (Defense Mechanism) summaryHow to turn a one-note sample into an lsdj wave-synth instrument with lsdj-wave-cruncher , by defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) — the companion of the library article s-intense-tech-05-wave-cruncher-instrument-library .
- Intense Tech #09 — Let's Table This Discussion! (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism 's lesson on lsdj tables in the intense-tech series: the four columns explained with the details the manual skips, nesting tables with A , a quirk that turns one table into a stereo effect, and attack …
- Intense Tech #10 — Get your Kicks with Version 6, Part 1 (Defense Mechanism) summaryWave-channel kicks in lsdj 6, expanding a video tutorial: why the wave channel, the new P/L/V instrument setting and its DRUM mode, a robust kick table, the "Kyoto kick" attack, and two ways to go from kick to bass. A …
- Intense Tech #11 — Kicks Part 2: Kick Heaven in Version 7 (Defense Mechanism) summaryThe second kick lesson of intense-tech : what lsdj 7 changed for DRUM pitch, wave snares, drums on the pulse channels, the PU1 hardware sweep, noise kicks and layering channels ( defense-mechanism ).
- Intense Tech #12 — Scoping Out New Features (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) tours the new features of lsdj 7.7.4 — the B command, FX/SPEED, silky wave, the super-fast retrig — while warning that version 7 "is still buggy and WILL CRASH" and that 6.9.0 remains …
- Intense Tech #13 — Interview with LSDj Developer Johan Kotlinski (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism interviews johan-kotlinski shortly before lsdj 's twentieth birthday: why the Game Boy, his background in the Swedish C64/Amiga scene, the birth of the Game Boy music movement, live mode, the changes …
- Intense Tech #14 — Let's Appreciate Version 8 (Defense Mechanism) summaryThe changes from lsdj 7 to 8, listed by defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ): the two-row screen map, ADSR on pulse and noise, Z on almost every command, renamed table modes, and playback optimisations that ended the …
- Intense Tech #15 — Let's Mix It Up (and Down) (Defense Mechanism) summaryMixing with four channels and "four bits of dynamic range": defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) treats volume, stereo placement and frequency range as three separate levers in lsdj , and adds two volume tricks — a snare …
- Intense Tech #16 — So You Want a Cartridge Family? (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) on how to run lsdj on a real game-boy : three kinds of flash cartridge, what each needs, and a warning about "LSDJ cartridges" sold online. The page carries a 2024 update that …
- Intense Tech #17 — The Joys of Noise (Defense Mechanism) summaryA deep dive into lsdj 's noise channel by defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ): how the shape byte maps onto the LFSR's octave and divisor, short-loop versus long-loop mode, how S , P , C and transposes act on shapes, the …
- Intense Tech #18 — ADSR Makes Life Easier! (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism on the pulse/noise ADSR that lsdj 8.1.0 introduced and the switch from hardware to software volume in 8.8.0: how the stages are written, how the speeds compare, instant decays, percussion transients …
- Intense Tech #19 — New Noise and 9.1.0 News (Defense Mechanism) summarylsdj 9.1.0 reorganised the noise channel into ordered notes; defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) explains the new layout, offers a converter for old shape values, and lists the other 9.0.1–9.1.0 changes — P , C and V on …
- Intense Tech #20 — Customize LSDj From Scratch with LSDPatch (Defense Mechanism) summaryA tour of lsdpatch 1.10.4 by defense-mechanism ( intense-tech ): upgrading an lsdj ROM in place, managing songs, building sample kits with proper resampling, and editing fonts and palettes.
- Intense Tech #21 — What's New in LSDj v9.2 (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) on the changes from lsdj 9.1.0 to 9.2.H: rebuilt sample timing, new synth PHASE modes, the noise PITCH FREE/SAFE setting, an envelope visualiser, a RESYNC wave play mode, row queueing …
- Little Sound Dj v9.2.6 Operating Manual (summary) summaryThe official manual of lsdj (79 pages, dated 9 May 2021) by johan-kotlinski . Chapter 1 covers the game-boy 's four sound channels, keys and hex; chapter 2 walks through the nine screens (song, chain, phrase, …
- little-scale — Abrasive on LSDJ Microtuning (2009) summarylittle-scale reposts abrasive 's own announcement of lsdj_tune , the script that turns the hand-editing of the previous day's post into a one-line command. Unusually for this blog, everything is in the text.
- little-scale — All 4-bit Waveforms That Have 32 Samples (2009) summaryA Max/MSP patch that enumerates every waveform the game-boy-apu 's wave channel can hold, and fails — usefully.
- little-scale — How to: Prepare Samples and Create LSDJ Kits (2008) summaryThe canonical kit-making tutorial, and the one the forum threads keep pointing back to. Its subject is the half the wiki did not have: what to do to a sample before lsdpatch ever sees it.
- little-scale — Let's Tune the Game Boy Like a Japanese Koto (2009) summaryA commission, and the clearest worked example of a just (ratio-based) retune in the cluster: the whole ROM tuned to the pentatonic hirajoshi scale on A. The spreadsheet screenshot shows every intermediate column, so the …
- little-scale — LSDJ Tuning Tables (2009) summaryFour sentences and two pictures, and the pictures are the post. They show where lsdj 's pitch tables live in the ROM — the prerequisite for every rom-retuning job that follows on this blog.
- little-scale — Sync Options for Game Boy Music (2008) summaryThe census of Game Boy synchronisation as it stood in October 2008: eighteen devices, what each one can and cannot do, and who made it. Nothing else in the wiki maps this territory.
- little-scale — Syncing something *to* LSDJ, and the un-sync piece (2006–2008) summaryEvery other post in this series makes the Game Boy a slave. These two make it the master clock for the rest of the studio — and the third, from 2006, throws the clock away entirely.
- little-scale — the Arduino Game Boy sync boxes: syncThing, Sync Tank and the AU$15 build (2008) summaryThree months in which a breadboard became a documented build anyone could copy for about AU$15. The important content is the pin-level wiring , which differs between lsdj and nanoloop and is stated nowhere else in the …
- little-scale — the LSDJ kit releases, and the stock kits extracted (2008–2014) summarySix years of giving lsdj kits away, from Street Fighter voices in 2008 to a louder TR-808 in 2014. Individually these are announcements; together they are the record of who supplied the scene's kits, and one of them …
- little-scale — Underclocking a Game Boy, and retuning it afterwards (2009) summaryThe pair that makes the point of the whole cluster: there are two ways to move a Game Boy's pitch, one in the hardware and one in the ROM, and doing the first without the second leaves you out of tune. The second post …
- little-scale — USB MIDI Game Boy Sync for $16, and DIN sync 24 (2011) summaryThree years after the Arduino boxes, the same job with no MIDI socket, no optocoupler and no power supply: a Teensy 2.0 that the computer sees as a MIDI device. This is also where the wiki gets a Game Boy link-plug …
- Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP1: Instrument Retriggering (video, 2016) summaryThe first of six episodes, framed as "hidden tricks in LSDj that are probably in the manual but not necessarily gone over in enough detail". The subject is one fact with a long tail: a note and an instrument number are …
- Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP2: In-depth WAV channel walkthrough (video, 2016) summaryA musician's tour of the wave instrument, synth and wave screens, four years before defense-mechanism 's ( s-defensemech-wave-channel-ramble ) and on an LSDj of the 4.x era. Its value now is the parts the other sources …
- Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP3: \"Isometric\" save-file walkthrough (video, 2016) summaryOne song taken apart screen by screen — his lsdj cover of Madeon's Isometric , used as a live opener. The framing is worth keeping: "when you have covers you don't have to focus on actual composition, you have to focus …
- Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP4: Sidechaining (video, 2016) summaryHow to get the pumping of sidechain compression on a machine with no compressor, demonstrated on a cover of deadmau5's Strobe . His definition first: a compressor fed by the kick "crush[es] the volume of every other …
- Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP5: Shortcuts and Workflow (video, 2016) summaryKey combinations and the habits built on them: the clipboard, cloning, marking, key repeat, and live transposition. Filmed with an on-screen controller visualiser (gamepadviewer.com) so the button presses are visible.
- Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP6: Fantastic Grooves and How to Use Them (video, 2016) summaryThe episode that reframes lsdj 's time: TEMPO is not BPM . "What actually governs the structure of your song is not the tempo setting, it's grooves. What tempo does is govern the clock speed and the tick rate."
- roboctopus — LSDJ & You: Collapse of the Waveform (2014) summaryThe introduction to drawing waves rather than generating them, aimed at players who can already write a song: "My goal is to help intermediate users learn techniques to really fill out their songs and take their sound …
- roboctopus — LSDJ & You: Echo Chamber (2014) summaryFour echo techniques for lsdj , from one that costs no channel at all to one that spends a second. The framing is arrangement, not effects: "Echoes can help fill an arrangement out and give it a greater sense of depth …
- roboctopus — PWM, I Choose You! (2014) summaryPulse-width modulation on the wave channel, where the hardware offers none: draw a square in the first wave and narrow it a little in each of the following fifteen, then let the instrument animate through them. "PWM …
- roboctopus — The Kinda Sorta Supersaw-lite; or, a Beefy Saw Bass (2013) summaryA short post with one instrument and one abandoned idea, both worth recording.
- Sabrepulse — Getting started with LSDJ tutorial (mirror at Adventure Kid) summaryA beginner's walkthrough of lsdj by sabrepulse that builds one small song — bass, lead, kick, snare and hats — screen by screen. Adventure Kid mirrored it because the original "seems like it is falling off the …
- Tyler Barnes — Advanced LSDJ Tutorial: The Ghost Channel (video, 2013) summaryThe original tutorial, and still the only step-by-step for drawing the waves. Its companion thread is s-chipmusic-lsdj-ghost-channel . The transcript is machine-generated, so what follows is what is spoken ; values …