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little-scale

entity person Game Boy General #person #gameboy #lsdj #sample-kits #tutorial-author #hardware #tuning #microtonality #nanoloop #sync #midi #diy
aliases little-scale, Sebastian Tomczak
sources little-scale — How to: Prepare Samples and Create LSDJ Kits (2008) · chipmusic.org — LSDJ kit creation and kit volume threads (2013) · little-scale — the LSDJ kit releases, and the stock kits extracted (2008–2014) · little-scale — the chip sample packs (2008–2012) · little-scale — extracting samples from Game Boy and GBA ROMs (2010, 2012) · little-scale — All 4-bit Waveforms That Have 32 Samples (2009) · little-scale — Sync Options for Game Boy Music (2008) · little-scale — the Arduino Game Boy sync boxes: syncThing, Sync Tank and the AU$15 build (2008) · little-scale — $1 Nanoloop MIDI Sync (2009) · little-scale — USB MIDI Game Boy Sync for $16, and DIN sync 24 (2011) · little-scale — Syncing something *to* LSDJ, and the un-sync piece (2006–2008) · little-scale — Overclocked Game Boy (2008) · little-scale — LSDJ Tuning Tables (2009) · little-scale — Abrasive on LSDJ Microtuning (2009) · little-scale — Underclocking a Game Boy, and retuning it afterwards (2009) · little-scale — Let's Tune the Game Boy Like a Japanese Koto (2009) · little-scale — Nanoloop Tuned to 18-TET, Hacked ROM (2009) · little-scale — Microtonal Chipmusic Compilation, call for tracks (2009)
created 2026-08-31 · updated 2026-08-31

Sebastian 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 — "little-scale has a blog post on how he makes kits" (source: s-chipmusic-lsdj-kit-threads). His own thread announcing it credits corrections from herr_prof and Random (source: s-little-scale-lsdj-kits).

Facts#

  • The tutorial fixes the numbers the whole practice rests on: a kit holds 3FA0 bytes, "just over two seconds worth of audio"; samples are exported as mono 8-bit PCM at 11.468 kHz; the Nyquist limit is 5.734 kHz and rolling off above it is what keeps kits from hissing. Names are three characters, because that is what LSDj displays (source: s-little-scale-lsdj-kits).
  • His mixing verdict on the kit channel — "sample playback tends to be quiet in comparison to the other LSDJ channels" — is why he recommends normalising and then adding 3–6 dB of deliberately clipping gain. The community reached the opposite workaround (turn the other channels down) in 2013 (source: s-chipmusic-lsdj-kit-threads).
  • He released Creative Commons sample packs, including a Sega Mega Drive pack used for the tutorial's worked example, and his kits circulate in the community collections (Chopin, Debussy, Mozart kits are named in the 2013 thread) — the packs and the kits are catalogued below.
  • PixyJunket in 2010: "you are on a roll with these tutorials, keep them up."
  • He works in spreadsheets and hex editors, and shows both: every retune in the 2009 tuning cluster is a Calc sheet of ratios and formulas pasted into Hex Fiend, published as a screenshot rather than as prose (sources: s-little-scale-koto-tuning, s-little-scale-nanoloop-18-tet).

The 2009 Game Boy tuning cluster#

Nine months of posts that gave the wiki alternative-tunings and rom-retuning. The idea is abrasive's; little-scale is the one who wrote down the addresses and the arithmetic (sources below):

  • The addresses. lsdj 3.8.9 carries two 216-byte pitch tables back to back — $6D3A for GB/GBC/GBA and $6E12 for the Super Game Boy — and "regardless of emulator settings, KiGB only reads from the SGB table, not the standard one" (source: s-little-scale-lsdj-tuning-tables, with nitro2k01 double-checking the KiGB bug). nanoloop 1.3d keeps 144 bytes at $730A (source: s-little-scale-nanoloop-18-tet).
  • The method, spelled out once, in the Nanoloop post: a spreadsheet column of note numbers → frequencies → Data = 2048 − 131072 ÷ f → hex nibbles → paste. "By changing the MIDI notes to fractions of whole numbers, different tuning can be obtained" (source: s-little-scale-nanoloop-18-tet).
  • 18-TET Nanoloop (2009-03-21), LSDj at 15-TET on video (2009-03-22), and a commissioned hirajoshi/koto tuning on A built from the ratios 9/8 · 6/5 · 3/2 · 8/5 · 2/1 (2009-12-10) (sources: s-little-scale-nanoloop-18-tet, s-little-scale-lsdj-tuning-tables, s-little-scale-koto-tuning).
  • Underclocking, and the repair for it. He fits a 2 MHz crystal in a DMG in place of the stock 4.194304 MHz "because 2MHz crystals are easy to find in shops", which leaves the machine nearly a semitone past the octave; Tom Gilmore's fix — compute the pitch table for 4 MHz, twice the fitted crystal — puts it exactly one octave down and in tune, and he prints all 216 replacement bytes (source: s-little-scale-underclocking-and-retuning).
  • He tried to make it a scene. A Microtonal Chipmusic Compilation called for FLAC submissions by 2010-02-20: "Microtonality is a field that seems to me to be a little overlooked when it comes to chipmusic" (source: s-little-scale-microtonal-compilation).

The 2006–2011 Game Boy sync work#

The other half of his chiptech output, and the part closest to m64's own MIDI work (sid-wizard-vessel). Details on sync:

  • He wrote the census. Sync Options for Game Boy Music (2008-10-09, updated 2008-10-29) surveys eighteen devices in a chart — author, LSDj/Nanoloop support, number of Game Boys, MIDI in/out/thru, keyboard notes, premade or DIY — corrected in the comments by nitro2k01, Athleos and Low-Gain. It is the reference map of that scene (source: s-little-scale-sync-options-for-game-boys).
  • He established the pin-level facts the wiki now uses: lsdj syncs on SC, nanoloop on SI, Nanoloop's clock is 12 ppqn against MIDI's 24, and a slaved DMG tracks external clock "from around 35 to over 200 beats per minute" (source: s-little-scale-arduino-gameboy-sync-boxes).
  • A ladder of builds, each cheaper than the last: Sync Tank (2008-04, 15 Game Boys, coarse and fine tempo pots), the syncThing (6 × LSDj + 6 × Nanoloop), a step-by-step AU$15 Freeduino box with a full parts list (2008-07), the $1 single-4017 Nanoloop circuit (2009-02) and finally a $16 Teensy that enumerates as a USB MIDI device with two wires per Game Boy (2011-08), extended to DIN sync 24 four days after a commenter asked (sources: s-little-scale-arduino-gameboy-sync-boxes, s-little-scale-1-dollar-nanoloop-sync, s-little-scale-teensy-usb-midi-sync).
  • He also ran it backwards. Two 2008 posts make LSDj the master clock — a 4040/4017 divider blinking an LED on odd sixteenths, then the same pulse clocking a C64 filter — the direction almost nobody else built for (source: s-little-scale-syncing-things-to-lsdj).
  • And he started by rejecting sync altogether: his earliest post here (2006-03-17) is three Game Boys with their start buttons on one switch and no link cable, written to drift apart (source: s-little-scale-syncing-things-to-lsdj).

Kits and sample packs, 2008–2014#

  • He supplied the scene's kits. Between 2008 and 2009: Mario Paint, Street Fighter 2 and Alpha ("Hadouken!", a kit per character), Star Trek TNG, Donk, Sega Mega Drive, Atari 2600, SN76489, nanoloop 2.3, YM2413 drums, and the composer kits — Debussy, Chopin, Mozart, Scriabin, Ellington — which were still being named in forum threads five years later. His note on the piano ones: crushed to "8 bit / 11.468 KHz" they "actually sound[] much better than I had anticipated" (source: s-little-scale-lsdj-kit-releases).
  • He extracted lsdj's own 22 stock kits as WAVs in 2014 and posted a deliberately louder TR808L the same day — the wiki's only complete list of the stock kits comes from that post's screenshot (source: s-little-scale-lsdj-kit-releases).
  • He recorded a dozen sound chips systematically and gave them away: 1344 Atari 2600 TIA samples, 945 from the SN76489, 245 from a YM2413, 316 POKEY noises, the YM2612's eight algorithms, the sid 8580's basic waveforms and all 59 SP0256-AL2 allophones — "recorded from hardware using custom designed interfaces", sounds he generated himself, dry and unfiltered. CC BY-NC in 2008–09, relicensed "copyright-free and license-free" by 2010 (source: s-little-scale-chip-sample-packs).
  • And he documented how to get samples out of a ROM — import the whole thing into Audacity as signed 8-bit mono PCM and look for the part that stops resembling data — which is how he lifted Pocket Music's 100 samples (source: s-little-scale-rom-sample-extraction).

The blog#

2907 posts (2006–2024), enumerated on 2026-08-31 into inbox/little-scale-post-index-2026-08-31.tsv. The labels that matter here are chipmusic (668 posts) and chiptech (260); the larger part of the blog is Ableton Live, Max for Live and Teensy work. Clusters relevant to this wiki, listed in inbox/scout-little-scale-2026-08-31.md: Game Boy microtuning and under/overclocking (2009, with abrasive and nitro2k01 — ingested 2026-08-31, above), the 2008 Game Boy sync series (ingested 2026-08-31, above), the classic LSDj kits extracted as WAVs and remastered louder (2014), about two dozen Creative Commons chip sample packs (SID 8580, SP0256-AL2, SN76489, YM2413, POKEY, SAA-1099, Atari 2600 — ingested 2026-08-31), ProSound output measurements, and the same microtuning project applied to Sega and Atari hardware. His tables and schematics are images, so the numbers rarely survive a text extraction.

chip-samples · recording-samples · lsdpatch · lsdj · chipmusic-org · alternative-tunings · rom-retuning · nanoloop · abrasive · nitro2k01 · game-boy · sync · live-tracking · sid-wizard-vessel

Sources#

s-little-scale-lsdj-kits · s-chipmusic-lsdj-kit-threads · s-little-scale-lsdj-tuning-tables · s-little-scale-abrasive-lsdj-tune · s-little-scale-underclocking-and-retuning · s-little-scale-koto-tuning · s-little-scale-nanoloop-18-tet · s-little-scale-microtonal-compilation · s-little-scale-sync-options-for-game-boys · s-little-scale-arduino-gameboy-sync-boxes · s-little-scale-1-dollar-nanoloop-sync · s-little-scale-teensy-usb-midi-sync · s-little-scale-syncing-things-to-lsdj · s-little-scale-overclocked-game-boy · s-little-scale-lsdj-kit-releases · s-little-scale-chip-sample-packs · s-little-scale-rom-sample-extraction · s-little-scale-all-4-bit-waveforms

source file wiki/entities/little-scale.md · graph