LSDJ Chip

What it is

Little Sound Dj is a tracker that runs on an original grey Game Boy, and since 2000 it has been the most played instrument in chip music, because the hardware costs twenty pounds and fits in a coat pocket. The DMG has two pulse channels, a four-bit wavetable channel and a noise channel. LSDJ hands you the wave channel two ways: it can hold a synthesised waveform or a kit, which is a bank of short 4-bit samples, and a kit is where the kick and the snare come from. One kit voice at a time. The hats come off the noise channel, which is separate, so the drum part splits into two rules rather than one. Live, people run two Game Boys through a mixer with a Pro-Sound mod tapping the headphone amp before it clips, and that is what makes the records sound cleaner than the console does in a bedroom.

What it sounds like

Grittier than the NES and considerably louder. The wave channel is four bits deep, so a kick sample arrives with visible quantisation hash sitting on top of it, and that hash is the character. Kits are usually 909 or Amen fragments crushed down to 4-bit and pitched by table. The noise channel gives a bright, brittle hat with a real envelope, so hats can be shaded in a way the drums cannot. Pulse channels carry the lead with a fast vibrato and a pulse-width sweep. Everything comes out of a single 3.5mm jack in mono, and the internal amp adds a hiss floor that most producers keep, because removing it takes the Game Boy out of the recording.

Key elements

• Kits on the wave channelKick and snare are 4-bit samples sharing one voice, so they take turns. Two drums cannot sound together no matter how the pattern is written.
• Three volume settingsThe wave channel's output register offers full, half and quarter and nothing between, so every kick and snare accent is one of three values.
• The noise channel hatA four-bit envelope with attack and decay, independent of the kit, which is why the hats carry all the dynamic detail in a Game Boy track.
• Groove tablesSwing is a two-value table of ticks per row. Six and six is straight, seven and five shuffles, eight and four is a hard limp. It applies to the whole song at once.
• Tables, not automationPitch, volume and waveform changes are written as per-tick command sequences. A snare roll is a table entry rather than a series of notes.

How to get them

• Split the drums by channelKick and snare into one monophonic lane, hats into a second. Then delete any hit where the kick and the snare want the same row. That deletion is the groove.
• Crush the kitTake a 909 kick, downsample to 8kHz and reduce to 4-bit with no dither. Trim to 120ms. The aliasing that appears is the sound of the wave channel, not a fault.
• Three velocities onlyAllow kick and snare exactly three levels, roughly 120, 60 and 30, and no values between. A ghost note is quarter volume, not a smooth ramp downward.
• Shuffle with a grooveA seven and five tick groove puts the offbeat sixteenth at seven twelfths of the beat. That is a hair looser than triplet swing, and it applies globally.
• Hats carry the movementRun sixteenths on the noise channel and shape them with a volume table: full on the beat, about half on the and, a third on the e and the a.
• Record the headphone outTake the Pro-Sound tap into a DI at line level rather than the built-in amp. High-pass at 30Hz to lose the console rumble and leave the hiss alone.

Reference points

Nullsleep, Bit Shifter, Sabrepulse, Trash80, Chipzel, Danimal Cannon, and the 8bitpeoples and Cheapbeats catalogues. Reference points for the sound rather than endorsements.