chipmusic.org — two Johan Kotlinski interviews (2012, 2014)
Two 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 interview (s-intense-tech-13-kotlinski-interview) and add a few facts to it.
Key claims#
2012
- Inspiration: making music on the Amiga "mostly using Musicline Editor"; friends in the demo group Hack n' Trade who shared his C64/Amiga/80s interests — together they bought Game Boys, backup cartridges and programmers "around 2000", when the Game Boy Color was new; "For me, the obvious thing to do was a music program", to see whether it could work with few buttons and a small screen and "what the Game Boy sound chip could achieve when being pushed to its limits".
- Future plans (2012): "mostly increased stability" — "the C compiler I have been using all these years is incredibly buggy", an upgrade was under way.
- Favourite LSDj musician "for old times sake": Lo-Bat, "an incredible innovator back in the early days"; users "by now it must be thousands"; expected at most "a hundred" to try it.
- Preferred model: the original Game Boy — "a shame that the screen is so poor".
- Nanoloop, tried before LSDj existed: "a beat making toy rather than something I would like to make full songs in"; FM: "cool but also not very original".
- Sound-design answers: pulse width "depends on the octave. For the base, I go for 15 or 25 first tick, then switch to 50"; pulse bass rather than wave bass, "probably due to lack of skills". Wished-for feature: better hardware — "Increased dynamics would be very nice to have."
2014
- LSDj "first came out in 2000"; background in Amiga homebrew software (ProTracker, Musicline Editor); no major hurdles — the platform documentation was online — "if there was any problem, it is that the C compiler … is very buggy and crappy". A programmer by trade.
- On the scene: "communication through computer networks always was an important part of chip music culture" — 1980s BBSes; micromusic.net "very energetic around 2000"; newer musicians he likes: Toriena, Trey Frey. In 2014 he was "not very motivated" to make his own chiptunes.
- What separates LSDj from a DAW: "the workflow is fast and flexible and that the program is fixed to doing one thing very well … from point A (first musical idea) to B (finished song) very quickly"; "The real strength is in musical arrangement."
- Tricks: "My tricks must anyway be outdated by now! So I will keep that for myself."
Practical takeaways#
Two facts to carry: LSDj is written in C (with assembly, per the 2020 interview) against a compiler its author distrusts, and the author's own bass recipe is a thin first tick (15/25 %) switching to 50 %.
Notable quotes#
"I would never have expected that when I first started on it."
Pages touched#
johan-kotlinski · lsdj · pulse-width-modulation · game-boy · chiptune · tracking-workflow · chipmusic-org