Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP5: Shortcuts and Workflow (video, 2016)

Key combinations and the habits built on them: the clipboard, cloning, marking, key repeat, and live transposition. Filmed with an on-screen controller visualiser (gamepadviewer.com) so the button presses are visible.

Key claims#

• Clipboard: SELECT+B enters highlight mode and the cursor extends the selection; B ends it and copies; SELECT+A pastes. While a selection is live, SELECT+A cuts instead — "when it's highlighted, SELECT+A is cut; when it's not highlighted, SELECT+A is paste." The hazard: entering highlight mode again is the only way out of it, and doing so overwrites the clipboard — "you can lose sections like that".
• Copy empty space on purpose: paste a blank section into the song screen to separate blocks, or cut one out to join two phrases — with the warning that cutting shifts everything after it and "can screw up your alignment".
• Slim vs deep cloning. Holding SELECT and pressing B then A clones the value under the cursor. Slim cloning "clones only the chain but keeps the phrase value intact"; deep cloning "clones the chain and clones every phrase inside it" into the next free slots. Slim is for a one-note variation or an octave change; deep is for reworking every phrase inside — "but be careful about not running out of phrases".
• The general rule: "everything you can highlight you can copy, paste and cut, and every value you can select you can clone." Chains, phrases, instruments, tables, transposition values, commands, whole screens, individual table columns — and, the discovery he is most pleased with, waveforms: highlight part or all of a wave in the WAVE screen and paste it into another, which makes hand-drawn banks far cheaper to build (wavetable-programming). He credits the find to an Australian Game Boy artist ("the biggest LSDj wizards I know, with hypnogram") whose name the auto transcript garbles.
• The clipboard survives loading another song ("a feature since version 3 something"), but it carries values only, not what they refer to: chain 1B pasted into another song points at that song's 1B. It works properly when both songs share a template — "if you keep template save files … then you copy paste this into your new song, then it'll sound great" — which he names as an easy way to build remixes.
• Space beats cloning. A whole eight-bar motif in his track Evasive Maneuvers is two phrases plus the chain's transpose column: "this is just a transposition of the same musical sentence, and so with only two phrases I do eight bars."
• Marking (press B three times in the song screen) highlights blocks for navigation — "it's in the manual but not a lot of people know about it" — so intro, break, riser and drop are identifiable at a glance while playing live. The number of marks is limited, so use them sparingly.
• Empty rows between sections do double duty: they air the song screen out visually, and in live mode each block then loops back on itself — "if I'm looking for the next section to jump to, I have time to decide" instead of triggering something unsynced (live-tracking).
• KEY DELAY / KEY REPEAT in the project screen: the first digit is how many ticks a held button waits before repeating, the second how many ticks between repeats. F1 is a slow first step then a sprint; he lives at 61, 72 or 62 — "adjust this to your tempo", faster settings for faster songs — and notes it also governs the SELECT+START row-retrigger stutter.
• Live transposition, applied on release. In the project screen, hold A and press the arrows: the new transpose value takes effect only when A is released, so a key change can be placed exactly on a bar line. He uses it live rather than cloning a section into a new key — the second exposition in his Star, and a semitone lift in Artifact (his ChipWIN submission). The same hold-and-release applies to tempo: "now I have modulated my whole track one semitone up". Caveat: "L commands and other pitch bends can react differently, and low notes can wrap to the next octave if you're not careful."
• Transposing to hear it fresh: shifting a finished track one or two semitones "gives me a lot of ideas … your track will sound really different and you say, oh, I didn't think of it that way".

Practical takeaways#

• Learn the cut/paste asymmetry (SELECT+A is cut while highlighting, paste otherwise) before it eats a section of your song.
• Reach for slim cloning by default; deep cloning spends phrases you will want later.
• The transpose column replaces most cloning: two phrases and a transpose make eight bars.
• Mark the song screen and leave empty rows between blocks — both are for the version of you that is playing live.

Notable quotes#

"Everything you can highlight you can copy paste and cut, and every value you can select you can clone."

"Copy pasting — even for something that you don't know you could try it out in every screen, report back your findings."

Relevance to the wiki#

tracking-workflow had almost nothing Game Boy-specific; this is a whole session of it, and the waveform-clipboard find changes the cost of every hand-drawn technique in the wiki (ghost-channel, pulse-width-modulation).

To verify#

• The credited discoverer of waveform copy-paste is named only in speech and the auto transcript garbles it ("CLA abuj lists"); described as an Australian Game Boy artist, they/them (unverified).
• KEY DELAY/REPEAT values are his preferences, not settings the manual prescribes; the tick interpretation is his ("I might be wrong, but I think it's counted in ticks") (unverified).

Pages touched#

tracking-workflow · live-tracking · orderlist · wavetable-programming · arrangement · lsdj · pain-perdu