Intense Tech #13 — Interview with LSDj Developer Johan Kotlinski (Defense Mechanism)
defense-mechanism interviews johan-kotlinski shortly before lsdj's twentieth birthday: why the Game Boy, his background in the Swedish C64/Amiga scene, the birth of the Game Boy music movement, live mode, the changes he is (not too) proud of and the roadmap for version 8 (intense-tech).
Key claims#
- Why the Game Boy: "mostly timing and luck" — he wanted to write a music editor and the Game Boy Color "appeared at the right time"; "in 2000 it was not that 'retro' but rather the most popular handheld, even if the architecture was dated already then."
- LSDj was "probably the first thing I worked on that went over a thousand lines" and his first assembly code, though he had programmed since about twelve.
- Background: grew up with the Commodore 64 and Amiga "like many others in Sweden"; early 1990s ProTracker and
.modswapping on BBSes and FidoNet (techno/house/IDM). "Chip music" then "was mostly synonymous with what is today known as keygen music, .mod files with tiny looped samples … considered neat and clever, but not something anyone would do exclusively." Also liked SID music and Paul van der Valk's Poing. Mid-1990s: the Amiga's Musicline Editor — "it was possible to create new sounds rather than just using samples", and "the vertical workflow made it easier for me to actually finish songs"; with ProTracker and later Cubase "I mostly made loops and had difficulties actually finishing anything". - Scene: his CD-R label Bleep Street (1998, about 50 copies per release); Goto80's Papaya EP on 7″ vinyl (2000) sold about a thousand copies. LSDj was sold as cartridges over the internet and through a local record store; micromusic.net and other early communities made Game Boy music "a movement of sorts". His own music is online as "rolemodel" (micromusic.net; 8bitpeoples 8BP047).
- Live mode (January 2001) came from Ableton Live's beta, shown to him by Tobi-Wan of Puss — not the other way round; he lived in Berlin near Ableton's offices in October 2001.
- Motivation: "Certainly that people keep on using and caring about it! Otherwise, I do not think I would put any effort into it at all."
- Changes he singles out: optimised dual-kit sample mixing in 1.4.0 (fast enough for the DMG — "extremely clever" code he finds hard to read today); the file screen in 3.0.0, where simple RLE compression fit many songs on a cartridge, after which "LSDj started to become as popular as Nanoloop"; prelisten in 3.9.5 ("for some, it felt like cheating"); the new pitch engine in 5.1.0 — "actually a total disaster. It took way too long until it was on par with what was there before in terms of kick crafting", but now "the vibrato in latest versions is spot on". Swedish saying: "There are no shortcuts to the perfect sound."
- Roadmap (early 2020): the stable v8 with accurate vibrato, de-clicked WAV playback, slowed-down
C, probability sequencing, higher maximum tempo, wave finetune, optimised playback and high-speed retrig; multi-stage envelopes for pulse and noise just started (the editor notes they shipped as ADSR by 8.1.8). The wave channel "has lots of untapped potential now that it is virtually clickfree". Suggestions via the LSDj Wishlist wiki page, Facebook or e-mail.
Practical takeaways#
Dates and version numbers for the lsdj history table; a first-hand definition of 1990s "chip music"; and the design lesson that finishing songs depends on workflow constraints — the reason a Game Boy tracker exists at all.
Notable quotes#
"In 2000 it was not that 'retro' but rather the most popular handheld, even if the architecture was dated already then."
"There are no shortcuts to the perfect sound."
Pages touched#
johan-kotlinski · lsdj · chiptune · tracking-workflow · randomization-and-probability · intense-tech · defense-mechanism