Intense Tech #12 — Scoping Out New Features (Defense Mechanism)

defense-mechanism (intense-tech) tours the new features of lsdj 7.7.4 — the B command, FX/SPEED, silky wave, the super-fast retrig — while warning that version 7 "is still buggy and WILL CRASH" and that 6.9.0 remains the stable choice.

Key claims#

• FX/SPEED (renamed CMD/RATE in version 8): a setting that slows C, P, R and V — P and V on pulse and wave only when PITCH is TICK; a higher value means more ticks per effect step.
• B (mayBe): in tables it is a probabilistic hop — B05 never hops to row 5, B85 hops about half the time, BF5 about 15 times in 16. On pulse, wave and noise notes the second digit is the chance of triggering: B00 never, B04 25 %, B08 50 %, B0F always. On kit instruments the two digits are the left and right samples separately — B48 = left 25 %, right 50 %.
• Wave channel oscilloscope on screen.
• Silky wave: a timer changes the waveform "at a more opportune time", removing the click the hardware makes when wave RAM is rewritten; a synth at SPEED 01 becomes "eminently more audible at its intended frequency".
• R8x super-fast retrig: a much-requested return of the old wave-channel pitch wrap — the generator restarts at a very fast rate; on wave the pitch becomes tunable (rather than relying on P), on a pulse kick it reaches "about 3 whole tones lower than the pulse channel is normally capable of".
• Wave instrument FINETUNE from -F to +F.
• Maximum tempo 295 BPM; T00–T27 set 256–295.
• Much faster song loading and saving, with intentional visual glitches while it happens. The previous article (11) had covered 7.0.6 and DRUM pitch.

Practical takeaways#

Bxy gives per-note and per-hop probability without tables; R8x extends kicks below the pulse channel's range; keep a backup when running a development version.

Pages touched#

lsdj · randomization-and-probability · retrigger · wavetable-programming · instrument-design · intense-tech · defense-mechanism