chipmusic.org — LSDJ kit creation and kit volume threads (2013)
The 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.
Key claims#
- katsumbhong's Audacity recipe: load the sample → set the project rate to 11,468 Hz → set the track to mono → cut the silence at both ends (remembering the ~2-second limit) → apply a compressor (and optionally an amplify that clips a little, "to increase the volume") → apply a lowpass at 5,734 Hz → export as Other Uncompressed Files → WAV (Microsoft), unsigned 8-bit PCM.
- Why the lowpass number (LLTH): "a lot of the hiss comes from artifacts caused by frequencies above the Nyquist frequency (which in this case is 5,734 Hz — sample rate divided by 2). I get around this by running every sample … through a lowpass filter with the cutoff frequency at 5734 Hz. I've found it to make a pretty good difference." He corrects himself mid-thread from 11,478 to 11,468 Hz, citing the LSDj manual.
- Samples longer than the limit: speed the audio up 2× in the editor, then set the kit instrument's SPEED to 0.5 in LSDj — "that is one way to get around the kit limitations in longer samples". He uses it for 4–5 second guitar chords sampled from Jam Sessions 2.
- The patcher's preview lies. A click at the end of a long sample "in my experience there is always that click in longer samples when played inside the patcher only. When the kit is loaded into LSDj and played back on the Game Boy there is no noticeable click."
- Volume: turn everything else down. The kit-volume thread reaches one answer — VCMG: "if you have the wave instrument volume at 3 already, there's not much else you can do … the best way to make your kits louder is to turn all the other channels down"; Timbob keeps most instruments "at
7Xish max" and calls the pan-hard-and-boost alternative "silly". Doubling samples up makes them "a lot noisier". The other route is to rebuild the kits yourself with the gain pushed — herr_prof: "I kind of wish someone would do a remaster of all the stock kits… they really are quiet for no reason!" - Kit-sharing culture of the period: personal Dropbox folders and lsdsng.com ("a place to store and share your LSDJ songs and kits"), with sample sources including a Texas Instruments Speak & Read, Speak & Spell, Street Fighter II, the Amen break and public-domain classical recordings.
Practical takeaways#
- The two numbers to remember are 11,468 Hz and its Nyquist half, 5,734 Hz: resample to the first, lowpass at the second, and most of the hiss disappears.
- 2× speed-up plus SPEED 0.5 doubles the usable sample length.
- Judge clicks on hardware, not in the patcher's preview.
- Kit volume is a mixing problem, not a kit problem — bring the pulses down to about
7X.
Notable quotes#
"The best way to make your kits louder is to turn all the other channels down." — VCMG
"They really are quiet for no reason!" — herr_prof, on the stock kits
Relevance to the wiki#
Confirms and modernises the preparation chain in s-little-scale-lsdj-kits, and adds the length workaround plus the community consensus on kit volume — the same "mix down to the quiet channel" rule roboctopus gives for the wave channel.
To verify#
- herr_prof gives the Game Boy's sample rate as 8192 Hz in the same thread, against LLTH's 11,468 Hz from the manual (which lsdpatch and the wiki follow). Unresolved in the thread; the manual figure is the one used here.
Pages touched#
chip-samples · recording-samples · lsdpatch · lsdj · little-scale · chipmusic-org · levels-and-headroom