hello hello! today is another good day, and i'm here to share one (1) SONG in the form of a tracker or DAW playback video with some accompanying writing about the SONG, as i've done the last two days and as the foreseeable future will hold daily...! comments, questions, etc are all welcome. hope you enjoy!
<-- the previous day's song | the next day's song -->
today's song is: Oreads & Nereids (The Shapers), for Gameboy, written with LSDJ
this was the first song i ever made in LSDJ! the original incarnation was about half the length; i added an additional B section for the final version that appeared on my chiptune EP from February, Elemental Harmony. i thought it made for a fitting first track - catchy & melodically focused, relatively accessible, but still glitchy like i like it >:) - all those keywords were basically my goals for the EP.
the outline of melody + bass was an earworm that was kicking around in my head for several months before i actually sat down and programmed the song into the Gameboy, and by that point i knew pretty much exactly how i wanted the song to go. the bulk of the work was finding TONS of ways to shape the sounds - something about the way LSDJ displays only one little pattern of 16 rows at a time makes me feel determined to fill in as much space as i can, which i think is what gives all my Gameboy tunes thus far their characteristic, uh, denseness. you're telling me i'm not supposed to put an effect command on every single row? come on now. the intensity of some of the effects like retrigger and ultra-fast vibrato are super appealing to me with LSDJ, too... i started experimenting with that in this song, and have kept doing them since :D
i love using the actual system with LSDJ - emulators don't feel the same! my friend tael sold me an awesome backlit DMG a couple years ago and i've been putting it to good use. the screen has pokemon on it.
fun fact about the video: i only later learned that there is a shortcut to "jump to next pattern" in LSDJ, so you can watch me trying my best to scroll at the right times to view whatever part i had pulled up. recording Gameboy videos was like an exercise in dexterity requiring practice, lol. i literally wrote down which channels i wanted to display for each section and made several attempts trying to get it as clean as possible x_x
