Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP3: \"Isometric\" save-file walkthrough (video, 2016)

One song taken apart screen by screen — his lsdj cover of Madeon's Isometric, used as a live opener. The framing is worth keeping: "when you have covers you don't have to focus on actual composition, you have to focus on arrangement — the most important thing about covering stuff in LSDj is actually sound design."

Key claims#

Arrangement and time#

• Tempo as a written curve. T commands ramp the song from tempo 100 through 142 to 150, then to 180 and back down to 80 — "each phrase I'll have a new tempo that goes slightly up very organically … this was really painstaking, checking the tempo in every phrase, [but it] really pays off". T "can be input in one single channel but affects the whole song", so he puts it on the second tick of a phrase when the first is taken by a groove command — while admitting the first tick is the right place.
• Two grooves at once. The chord section runs at groove C C (12 ticks per step) against another channel at groove 2 — "this is 12 and this is 2, they time together perfectly, you just have to be a bit of math". Because the fast channel is one sixth of the slow one, an H hop is needed at the end or the two do not land together (shuffle-funktempo).
• Empty phrases as structure. Between sections he leaves an empty phrase that sets the groove for what follows and "puts everything on hold to keep you waiting for what's going to happen next".
• Arps in phrases, not tables, when tables are scarce — the reverse of his usual advice, chosen because the song needs its tables elsewhere: "in order to save tables what I did was actually write the complete arp section in a phrase".

Sound design#

• Detune as character. The intro layers a wave instrument and two pulses on the same note, one detuned with a very slow low-frequency vibrato — "it just sounds like it's drunk … it makes for interesting phase effects with a very slow periodicity", "almost like an owl howling in the night". His general rule: "slow vibratos are always good to give your sound some character", and they fight the robotic feel of a held pulse note (detune, vibrato). A slow vibrato also makes L commands react more slowly.
• A delay inside one channel. Two instruments, D panned right and E panned left, alternating, playing the same phrase offset by three notes — "it's like a delay of this, offset by three, all in one channel". He notes the alternative (an AUTOMATE table with L/R and an H) and why he could not use it here: those instruments already needed their tables for pulse-width modulation and a slight vibrato (fake-echo, stereo-panning).
• Swell and fall need two phrases, not two instruments. A chord that swells uses an envelope 1D (start 1, rise at speed D); the falling half is the same instrument in the next phrase with a falling envelope — "since you have way more phrases than tables I still prefer to use phrases, plus it's a tad easier to time them together".
• Wave-channel bass with a filter sweep built into the synth: high resonance and low cutoff at the end, high cutoff at the start, so the note "cycles through a very abrasive squarey sound"; the wave E envelope, "only zero to three", brings it down gradually — "not as versatile as the pulse envelope but still very efficient when you use it well".
• Frame offsets for variation. F3 on a three-frame bass "offsets the wave cycle" so the note does not start at its quietest, and using different offsets on successive hits "makes a bit of differentiation to something that's really four-to-the-floor, really repetitive".

Drums#

• The noise "explosion", all in one table: a very high shape for the transient, then the envelope drops straight down and rises slowly — "so you still have the impact but it still lets the kick cut through … this tricks your brain into thinking that it's just [one long hit]". A H hop then loops the tail indefinitely instead of letting it fall.
• S is relative, and that is the trick. "The S command adds to the shape parameter, it does not set the shape … it's relative, so it adds on top." Adding F0 repeatedly wraps the shape around once and lands one step lower each time, which walks the noise slowly downward instead of jumping; the H hop's timing sets how often the addition happens, i.e. how fast the sweep moves (instrument-tables).
• Kicks: transient plus pitch drop, and K commands in a row to cut successive kicks a little sooner — "it cuts also the pitching envelope, so this one will end up being higher than the next", which differentiates repeated kicks. Toms are "exactly the same way you make a kick but with a slower pitch slide".
• Snares are tuned instruments. "A super common misconception that everyone makes when they start doing electronic music is that snares are only noise. This is not true" — his snare pairs a noise hit with a short tonal component on the wave channel: "character in the high end and character in the mids, really important for kickass snares."
• Use explosions sparingly: "you don't want noise explosions on every kick … if you do that you won't have any room for any other percussive element."

Chords from two channels#

• Four-note chords without C. C gives three notes at one tick each; he writes the arpeggio into a table two ticks per note — 00 44 77 CC (root, major third, fifth, octave) — "so this is slower and it really gives you the time to appreciate each note … faster arps, you can just hear the click noise between each note and not really the note itself".
• Five notes, because the bass is not the root. With the bass sitting on the relative minor third under a major-shaped arp, "this makes for like a five-sound chord which is really rich".
• Two arps, offset and detuned in timbre. The second pulse channel runs the same table offset by three ticks, one channel at 25 % duty and the other at 50 % — "you have interesting phasing going on". With two ticks per note there are five usable offsets, and he flags this as the trick he is proudest of: "your brain just kind of glues them all together … you don't even hear the note switch in the arp, you just hear chords."
• One instrument, many tables. "What I used to do before was to have one different instrument per chord with a table; but if you optimise carefully and choose your root notes well, you can just slap the same instrument with a different table on top" — table 0C is the same shape with a minor third instead of a major.
• Each arp instrument triggers a rising envelope so the chords duck under the kick: "kind of your poor man's sidechain compression emulation in LSDj, with just volume" (sidechain-pump).

Mixing and live#

• "If you want to go loud, go quiet." "Don't make it loud, make the rest quiet — you can really hear it loud because it swells, not because it is loud; because it's only loud referentially." His kick transients sit at the highest volume available and everything else caps around 6.
• The select+start trick (song mode only): hold SELECT then hold START and the selected row retriggers repeatedly — a stutter he uses live. Its rate follows KEY DELAY/REPEAT and the tempo — "if you have like a 120 song I recommend 76, 130 75" — and he warns it is hard to keep in time in an emulator and easier on hardware (live-tracking).

Practical takeaways#

• A cover is an arrangement exercise: the tempo curve, the groove pairs and the empty phrases carry the form, and the sound design carries the identity.
• Two pulse channels playing the same arp table at different duties and a three-tick offset read as one wide chord.
• Relative commands (S, F) are sweep generators when combined with a hop — the hop's period sets the sweep's speed.

Notable quotes#

"If you want something to sound loud, don't make it loud — make the rest quiet."

"Snares are only noise. This is not true."

Relevance to the wiki#

The wiki has plenty of isolated recipes; this is the source that shows them assembled — and it supplies the arpeggio-offset chord technique, the relative-S noise sweep and the "go quiet to go loud" mixing rule, none of which the wiki had.

To verify#

• Tempo values (100, 142, 150, 180, 80), the T64/T8/T96 command values, envelope 1D and the F3 offset are spoken over a fast walkthrough in an auto transcript; the shapes of the techniques are clear, the exact values are unverified.
• He offers the .lsdsng on request in the comments; whether it was ever posted is unknown (unverified).

Pages touched#

chord-arpeggio · instrument-design · arrangement · shuffle-funktempo · fake-echo · detune · stereo-panning · sidechain-pump · live-tracking · instrument-tables · wavetable-programming · lsdj · pain-perdu