third time's the charm
By wangus on July 11, 2022 12:01 am
my first time really drilling into LSDJ! i've had it (and a DMG) for years, and have done a few quick loops, but it never clicked.
I'm still on the bad habit of not really starting every week's tune until upload day. So I decided to revisit some older thing for less effort.
This track started as the third thing I ever made on the M8, headless at the time, almost a year ago to the date. Didn't really go anywhere, just the chippy intro.
I revisited it last October (hardware M8 at that point) and realized if I were going for the DMG/NES-style chiptune, I might as well commit. Condensed the staccato ostinato to one track, and the chords to another, arp'd. So stripped down to 2 pulse channels, one 32-length wavsynth channel, and one noise channel. Much punchier stripped-down, good.
At the time I was thinking of the intro starting off roughly LSDJ-style, then dropping into an electro chip-fusion tune.
Today, I decided this tune would be most fun in proper DMG form. So I transcribed what I had to LSDJ, and rolled from there.
Tons of experience on the M8 was what finally helped me dig into LSDJ here. So much technique / muscle memory / tunewriting translated over. I thought M8 was more similar to LSDJ though; found myself trying a bunch of key combos that are different/absent in LSDJ. (e.g. cut, or tapping a chain/phrase to advance to the next empty one. I also don't yet understand the full logic of how copying a chain/phrase selects the new number? it doesn't seem to be exactly what i expect).
Sound design is obviously totally different from what's possible on the M8, and even sequencing is significantly different (no volume column, only one command column in a phrase). But I found myself able to adapt and settle on new flows pretty easily.
my silliest mistake was forgetting that there's only 7F chains in LSDJ, and when I noticed that, I also forgot that there are FE phrases still. So I ran out of nicely-organized chain numbers (was spacing them out too much), then ended up cramming all my phrases under 7F when I could have kept those nicely segmented...
I used the M8 to record and add a little bit of chorus/delay/reverb/limiter. Ran out of time for a little EQ polish.
dunno yet how much more I'll play with LSDJ. not sure how much it's interesting to me just on the novelty. But if that doesn't wear off fast, it's definitely a good creative shift, making me interact in different ways with the tunes I'm writing.
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and video, same-day for once!
(see description for link to tool I used for the waveforms)
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Not sure which version you're on, but at least for me the newest dev versions have offered some nice sound design possibilities due to performance optimizations, smoother WAV channel synths and built-in overclock tempos.