Little Sound DJ

My childhood gameboy, an lsdj cartiridge, and a pair of new headphones later, I've started composing my piece for an October 30th Midday Music concert. The inspiration for the piece comes from chiptune music, which I stumbled upon a couple months ago.

(Gameboy compliments of my mom, headphones compliments of Phil)

Little Sound DJ (LSDJ) is a cartridge for gameboy that allows a musician to create and sequence those low bit sounds that my generation has come to know and love. The actual cartridge has been out of print for a while now, you can either flash the rom to a blank cartridge like I did (via nonfinite) or search on ebay.

As far as hardware is concerned, people seem so prefer the original Gameboy sound even though LSDJ is also compatible with Gameboy Color and Gameboy Pocket. Lots of people also modify their gameboy by adding an 1/8" jack to reduce ground noise, or adding a backlight to the screen.


In LSDJ, you can choose Square Wave, Drum Kit, Speech Synth, or Noise as your instrument of choice; then use filters, envelopes, and transpositions to alter the sound any way you like. Once that's done, there's a four voice sequencer that you can use to your hearts desire. You can do some neat things like vibrato, slides, and panning which I'm excited to play with. Other things, like the drum kit and speech synth, are not as interesting to me (probably because better alternatives have appeared since ~2000 when the software was made).

I should have sound samples for you shortly, along with a big description of the PD patch I'm writing. Basically with gameboy samples and live input from lsdj, I'm hoping to make a composition which demonstrates that lowbit square waves can be used for more than just cheesy video game music. Not that I don't love cheesy video game music :)