LSDJ
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- This article is about the Nintendo hardware. For the musician, see LSDJ (musician).
LSDJ, Little Sound Disk Jockey, is a homebrewed cartridge for the Nintendo Game Boy, programmed by Johan Kotlinski (known to the chiptune world as Role Model), that enables the user to sequence and program music to run on the Game Boy's sound processor; the PAPU. The LSDJ is primarily used by chiptune artists, however it is also popular with many other musicians for writing songs featuring gameboy sounds. The official cartridges were clear blue and had the trademark LSDJ logo on the top-front.
The sequencer of LSDJ has a very open structure. It was designed to leave all the musical possibilities of the Game Boy in the hands of the user. The system can be said to be both simple and complex; it has a slight learning curve, but when learned, it is possible to transcribe a complete Bach piece to it in less than one hour.
The Game Boy sound chip offers four channels with 4-bit sound. Custom waveforms can be created by free-hand drawing, or by using a subtractive synthesizer with resonant filters. For extra versatility, LSDJ also contains a quite powerful arpeggiator, which possibilities go far beyond the classic SID-style chords. In terms of samples, LSDJ boasts a set of 59 phonemes for programmable speech. It also features drum kits sampled from the TR-606, TR-707, TR-727, TR-808, TR-909, CR-78, CR-8000, KR-55, DR-55, DR-110, Drumulator, RhythmAce, TOM and LinnDrum drum machines.
Commercial production of LSDJ units has been placed on indeterminate hiatus since sometime around 2003; however, the LSDJ's ROM image is downloadable from the LSDJ website for $39.98. A demo of the ROM (in which saving is disabled) is available for free. The ROM can be placed onto a rewritable cartridge from one of the various backup devices made for the Game Boy. Original and commercially produced LSDJ cartridges occasionally appear on eBay and are competitively bid upon, with some private individuals asking up to $175 for a Game Boy Color, and an LSDJ cartridge. One individual won a cartridge with a winning bid of $330.
