chipmusic.org — Wav Instrument Tutorials for LSDJ (2014)

"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 working argument against imitation as a goal.

Key claims#

• The flute recipe (Victory Road): start from a sine/triangle "maybe with a couple notches in it for some extra harmonics"; make the first frame of the synth quite a bit louder than the rest, set PLAY to MANUAL, and put an F01 on the first tick of the instrument's table. The loud first frame is the attack; every note that carries the instrument number gets it.
• Tonguing and slurring for free: with that setup, "you can imitate tonguing and slurring in the phrases by removing the instrument number from notes that you want slurred" — a note without the instrument number does not restart the table, so it does not get the attack frame.
• Flutter tonguing: give the third frame a slightly different volume and shape, then alternate between the second and third frames from a separate table — "F01 to move ahead, FFF to move back" — started in the phrase with an A command. (FFF is −1 in the F command's relative arithmetic.)
• Victory Road's summary: "using a variety of vibrato speeds (Vxx commands) will also help make a flutey tone sound more convincing. It's all about articulation, really. LSDJ is really good for flutey articulation though!"
• The attack is where the instrument lives (tyler-barnes): "You can make some frames with mostly noise bursts to simulate the attack phase of a musician blowing into the flute", switched by a table, with "vibrato and tasteful volume modulation" carrying the rest. Fudgers suggests layering "some very quiet noise with a slow decay" underneath.
• The counter-argument (an0va): "don't worry about trying to emulate other instruments too much in LSDJ, you'll always get disappointed (and other people will only hear '8bit' anyway). Instead, try to embrace the timbres and come up with wacky crazy sounds through trial and error." His own method is subtractive by feel: "Start with sine or a thick square so you have a lot of bass — then mess with parameters and chip away at the bass frequencies until you get something you like. It's like ice sculptures then."
• Which end of CUTOFF is bass: 00 is the low end, FF the high — which is why a high-pass instrument at the default FF seems to go silent, "the cutoff is happening at the highest point" (an0va; consistent with the harmonic reading of CUTOFF in s-intense-tech-01-wave-synth-deep-dive-part-1).
• A lost tutorial series: roboctopus wrote a series of articles on the WAV channel for noisechannel.org — "which seems to be dying" — and was porting them to roboctopus-8bit.tumblr.com in 2014.

Practical takeaways#

• A wave instrument becomes an instrument through its table: loud first frame = attack, omitted instrument number = slur, two frames alternated from a second table = flutter, V for the vibrato.
• Design the attack separately from the tone — a noise-ish frame or two at the start does more for realism than any amount of waveform polish.
• Or don't imitate at all: chip away at a bass-heavy start until the sound is your own.

Notable quotes#

"You can imitate tonguing and slurring in the phrases by removing the instrument number from notes that you want slurred." — Victory Road

"It's like ice sculptures then — you're starting with a big block and then chipping away." — an0va

Relevance to the wiki#

Fills the LSDj gap on lead-articulation (the page had only tracker-sample techniques) and gives instrument-design a wave-channel attack method that is not a drum.

Resolved#

• roboctopus's WAV-channel article series (the thread's loose end) is found and ingested: noisechannel.org is indeed gone, but the roboctopus-8bit.tumblr.com mirror survives, and four of the posts are now sources — s-lsdj-and-you-collapse-of-the-waveform, s-lsdj-and-you-pwm, s-lsdj-and-you-supersaw-bass, s-lsdj-and-you-echo-chamber (2026-08-31).

Pages touched#

lead-articulation · instrument-design · vibrato · instrument-tables · wavetable-programming · lsdj · tyler-barnes · chipmusic-org