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Creating chiptunes with Python, MIDI and LSDJ
Like any human being I love music. Like any nerd I love music made on old video game consoles.
In order to make music on my old video game console of choice, the Nintendo Gameboy, I use a piece of software called Little Sound DJ (LSDJ).
LSDJ, to put it very basically allows you to program notes into phrases (which are essentially bars of music) and then create chains of phrases which then become a song.
Working with limitations
The Gameboy only supports four channels (there is a fifth, but it’s hard to work with), two pulse channels, one wave and one noise channel and while it can play all four channels at once the individual channels themselves are monophonic.
These limitations are actually what drew me to chiptune music, the way you have to create your own means of implementing simple musical structures such as chords or non-common-time time signatures.
LSDJ offers tools to compensate for this lack of functionality, for instance a 9/8 time signature can be achieved by having two phrases of 16 notes with the second phrase ending after the 2nd note (so it’s 18/16) and chords by playing the notes in the chords very fast.
Chiptune artists aren’t just limited by the musical tooling available to them however, there’s also the limited resources of the hardware too.
LDSJ can support up to 254 16-note phrases and 254 16-phrase chains, this is actually plenty for most needs but with the 9/8 example above as two phrases are needed it’s suddenly halved to 127 phrases and if we then assume all four channels will be used that’s only 31 phrases per instrument, or 558 notes.
LSDJ again offers some tools to work with this limitation, when adding a phrase to a chain there’s the option to transpose the notes so you can maximise phrase re-use for things like key changes.
Stepping up my game
The majority of the songs I’ve composed / programmed in LSDJ have been relatively straight forward, being either in common time or having simple song structures.
However, I decided to give myself a challenge recently and attempt a cover of Culinary Hypersensitivity by…
