Pain Perdu
Game 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 cool tricks that people have found through experimentation but that aren't necessarily well-documented" (source: s-painperdu-01-instrument-retriggering). He writes dance music and teaches from it — the sidechaining episode is built on a cover of deadmau5's Strobe. defense-mechanism credits him for a snare-transient trick (source: s-intense-tech-15-lets-mix-it-up-and-down).
The series#
| ep | subject | date | runtime |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Instrument retriggering | 2016-07-04 | 20:31 |
| 2 | In-depth WAV channel walkthrough | 2016-07-07 | 47:42 |
| 3 | "Isometric" SAV walkthrough | 2016-07-12 | 54:48 |
| 4 | Sidechaining | 2016-08-25 | 10:40 |
| 5 | Shortcuts and workflow | 2016-09-03 | 31:02 |
| 6 | Fantastic grooves and how to use them | 2016-11-30 | 27:56 |
All six episodes are summarised in this wiki.
What the wiki takes from him#
- Note and instrument are independent, and the instrument number is a retrigger — of the envelope, of the table, and of the wave synth's cycle. Leave it off and things keep running; that is the whole of retrigger's LSDj story and the reason a table set to AUTOMATE advances per instrument value, not per note (source: s-painperdu-01-instrument-retriggering).
- Sidechaining without a compressor: kick and bass in one channel,
Ecommands writing the recovery, and a faster groove for the resolution that makes the pump stop sounding like a pump (source: s-painperdu-04-sidechaining). - Tempo is not BPM. Tempo sets the tick rate; grooves decide how many ticks a step lasts, per channel, and also inside tables via
G(source: s-painperdu-06-grooves). - The wave instrument's own rhythm: LENGTH picks how many waves the cycle uses, REPEAT how many of them repeat at the end, SPEED is ticks per frame and should equal the groove's tick count. Hand-drawn waves work in every play mode, not only MANUAL, and an
Foffset large enough walks a note into the next synth's waves (source: s-painperdu-02-wav-channel-walkthrough). - Everything you can highlight, you can copy — including waveforms, which makes hand-drawn banks affordable — and cloning comes in slim and deep depths (source: s-painperdu-05-shortcuts-and-workflow).
- Chords out of two pulse channels: the same two-tick arp table on both, different duties, offset by three ticks, so the pair reads as one wide chord (source: s-painperdu-03-isometric-sav-walkthrough).
- Mix by subtraction: "if you want something to sound loud, don't make it loud — make the rest quiet."
Songs named in the videos#
Isometric (his cover of Madeon, taken apart in EP3), Evasive Maneuvers, Star, Artifact (a ChipWIN submission), and a Strobe cover snippet used to demonstrate sidechaining. None have pages; the walkthrough of Isometric is the one the wiki draws technique from.
Related#
retrigger · sidechain-pump · shuffle-funktempo · instrument-tables · wavetable-programming · tracking-workflow · live-tracking · chord-arpeggio · instrument-design · lsdj · defense-mechanism
Sources#
s-painperdu-01-instrument-retriggering · s-painperdu-02-wav-channel-walkthrough · s-painperdu-03-isometric-sav-walkthrough · s-painperdu-04-sidechaining · s-painperdu-05-shortcuts-and-workflow · s-painperdu-06-grooves · s-intense-tech-15-lets-mix-it-up-and-down