(Get it? Because my initials are D.J., which makes me a DJ, and that’s funny because it’s not only… ah, fuck it.)

Today’s highlights were a long due Falafel treatment in company of the lovely Maria and a good portion of the day spent with Little Sound DJ, which I mentioned briefly in yesterday’s post about Piggy.

Little Sound DJ is a minimalistic music production software designed for the DMG-001, commonly known as the original Game Boy, you know, those grey bricks with shitty displays capable of killing small creatures. As it turns out, if you’re not in possession of The Brick, you can always resort to one of a dozen Game Boy emulators, some of which even work adequately on OS X.

In comparison with Piggy, LSDJ is quite a bit chunkier, but it sounds way more like what I’m aiming for, so I’ll probably stick around. Thanks to super helpful tutorials by Sabrepulse, Nullsleep and Danimal Cannon, I’m learning lots about production in a very limited setting, such as creating your own kick drum from scratch with an analogue pulse or humanizing hi-hats using envelopes.

Anyway, that screenshot above shows the arrangement view of my frist practice track, made in about 2 hours. As you can see, there’s channels for two pulses, a wave and noise respectively. This is what it sounds like:

(Download)

It’s generic and boring and I’m pretty sure my emulator doesn’t get the timing quite right, but I’m getting there.

I shall hereby continue my experiment of creating at least one little thing a day and catch up on last night’s results. Please excuse the holdup, but there were a few hours of sweet slumber to be had.

As some of you may know, I’m an amateur music producer and have toyed with the likes of Ableton Live and Logic Pro before, meaning I’m familiar with huge, fine-tuned digital audio workstations. Several years of affection towards chip music – I still have fond memories of listening to Bit Shifter, Sabrepulse and Anamanaguchi for the first time – had me wondering how chip musicians go about creating their sound.

The obvious choice being the Little Sound DJ, I examined the DMG-001 cartridge miracle for a bit before stumbling upon LittleGPTracker aka. “the piggy”, an alternative that runs on OS X natively, doesn’t require an emulator and supports custom samples. I had a blast making music with it and, even though it takes a while to learn the ropes of traditional tracker software paired with progressive pattern management, I found that it’s pretty efficient.

Anyway, here’s what I managed to squeeze out after two or three hours. “Piggy”, named after its place of birth, was created entirely with square and sawtooth waveforms and a few chip drum samples courtesy of Henry Homesweet. It’s not that great as a piece of music, but consider the environment it was crafted in (shown above is a screenshot of the arrangement view with hexadecimal pattern identifiers).

Between the big players such as Ableton, the neat tracker software Renoise (which I really need to delve into) and “raw” production software like LSDJ and Piggy, the latter were definitely the most fun. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll start working on a whole album like this.

By the way: Googling Piggy’s website just led me to this fine tune we all should re-visit more often.

Nine Inch Nails – Piggie:

Hey pig
nothing’s turning out the way I planned
Hey pig, there’s a lot of things I hoped you could help me understand
What am I supposed to do? I lost my shit because of you
Nothing can stop me now
’cause I don’t care anymore

More Twin Peaks. Because there’s nothing like a good ol’ cuppa. (Seriously though, Cooper’s caffeine intake is a little alarming.)

(Original size) We’ve been re-watching Twin Peaks. Perfect material for a LucasArts style point & click adventure if you ask me.

There haven’t been any art posts in a while, so here’s a pony I made for Maria during lunch break. (To be honest, I don’t have the slightest clue about how a horse is supposed to look, to say nothing of their step sequences.)