Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP2: In-depth WAV channel walkthrough (video, 2016)

A musician's tour of the wave instrument, synth and wave screens, four years before defense-mechanism's (s-defensemech-wave-channel-ramble) and on an LSDj of the 4.x era. Its value now is the parts the other sources do not cover: the instrument screen's LENGTH / REPEAT / SPEED as a rhythm generator, two myths corrected, and a vibrato trick nobody else in the wiki mentions.

Key claims#

• The frame is the unit. "The wave channel in LSDj is a software wavetable synth" — a synth generates 16 waves from a start and an end parameter set and interpolates everything between, and the instrument cycles through them. Wave numbering: synth 0 is waves 00–0F, synth 1 is 10–1F, "and it goes up to synth F, so FF".
• PLAY, and why MANUAL is clean: ONCE runs to the last wave and stops, LOOP repeats, PINGPONG runs there and back. MANUAL "will only read the frame that you call — this is why when you have MANUAL you have no clipping at all between frames, because it's only reading one". Every automatic frame change makes the click (game-boy-apu).
• LENGTH, REPEAT and SPEED as rhythm. LENGTH is how many of the 16 waves the cycle uses; REPEAT is how many frames at the end of that cycle repeat afterwards — "repeat 0 … it stays still; repeat 1, doodlee doodlee doodlee do … so if you play with this cleverly you can have really interesting rhythmic wave cycles". He sets REPEAT F whenever he uses PINGPONG so the whole cycle keeps moving.
• SPEED belongs to the groove, not to the tempo. SPEED is ticks per wave frame; 1 "is more clipping than actual modulation". He uses 6 because at groove 6/6 six ticks is exactly one step — "each step is actually like a new sixteenth note in your beat" — and says so generally: "this is relevant to the groove, so if you're in groove 5 5 this is going to be 5, for groove 7 7 this is going to be 7" (shuffle-funktempo).
• Myth corrected: hand-drawn waves are not only for MANUAL. "One of the most common misconceptions is that the hand-drawn waves in LSDj are only accessible when you set this to MANUAL … but actually hand-drawn waves are available even when you're in PINGPONG and LOOP and ONCE." You can edit the individual waves a running synth plays. The catch is the familiar one: "once you start drawing, every time you're going to input a new modification [in the synth screen] this is going to overwrite everything you've drawn in order to recalculate all the waves between" (s-chipmusic-lsdj-wav-channel-release).
• The question he could not answer, answered elsewhere: hunting for which physical waves a LENGTH-3 synth plays, he tries them one at a time on camera and gives up — "this really shows that I don't know how LSDj [works]". The chart defense-mechanism published in 2020 is the answer: LENGTH 3 generates waves 0, 5, A, F of that synth (lsdj).
• Vibrato on a wave instrument. Fast V commands are normally a pulse-channel trick, "and because wave instruments tend to be already super raspy we tend to not use these at all in the wave" — but on a raspy hand-drawn wave "the rasp plus the rasp phase together and they create a kind of flanger filtery modulation effect", all from a single MANUAL frame with no synth movement. Two warnings: it "eats through CPU like crazy", and because the modulation interacts with the note's pitch, the value that works on one note does not work on the next — so it goes on the note, not in the table.
• A vibrato editing trick: in the instrument screen, LEFT/RIGHT cycles the vibrato type while A + UP/DOWN inverts the vibrato's phase (vibrato).
• F bleeds between synths. F is relative — "this is not going to call frame 1, this is going to say frame +1 to the existing cycle" — so a large offset walks a cycle out of its own synth and into the next one's waves: "so you're going to have a wave that evolves into your other synth". In MANUAL, he believes it simply calls the frame number given.
• Parameter-by-parameter, as he demonstrates them: VOLUME above 10 makes the wave clip against the display's ceiling, which is what CLIP then reads ("it adds more square things to it, because obviously if it clipped it's flat, so it's square"); WRAP turns it into "a lot of saw waves that wrap into each other"; PHASE compresses the wave horizontally, and at 1F on normal phase there is nothing left — "don't put 1F unless you want silence, because a flat wave is silence"; RESYNC fills the gap with copies ("when you have more waves, higher harmonics appear"), RESYNC2 overwrites the previous wave with the next; CUTOFF sweeps from a bass-heavy near-sine upward on lowpass and the reverse on highpass; VSHIFT lifts the whole wave for a raspy tone; Q "boosts the frequencies right where they are cut off … this is what allows you to feel the sweep". His favourite patch is resonance 4, VOLUME 20, CUTOFF 40.

Practical takeaways#

• Tie SPEED to the groove, not to a number you like: SPEED = the groove's tick count makes one wave frame per step.
• LENGTH + REPEAT is a rhythm, not just a length — short cycles with a repeating tail evolve in time with the music.
• Draw into a running synth; just never reopen the synth screen afterwards.
• A fast V on a raspy MANUAL wave is a flanger, per note, at a CPU cost.

Notable quotes#

"Hand-drawn waves are actually available even when you're in ping-pong and loop and once play types."

"Don't put 1F unless you want silence, because a flat wave is silence."

Relevance to the wiki#

The instrument-side counterpart to the wiki's synth-side wave material, plus two corrections that matter to anyone drawing waves for the ghost-channel or for pulse-width-modulation.

To verify#

• His PHASE 1F = silence is true for the LSDj of 2016; by 9.x "the phase at 1F is not total silence as it used to be, it's actually just this waveform" (source: s-defensemech-wave-channel-ramble) — a version difference, kept on both pages rather than resolved.
• The favourite patch's values (resonance 4, VOLUME 20, CUTOFF 40) and the V values he settles on are spoken while editing, from an auto transcript (unverified).

Pages touched#

wavetable-programming · vibrato · lsdj · shuffle-funktempo · filter-programming · ghost-channel · pain-perdu