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Abandoned on Fire

This is the text of a pdf that I included along with the associated sav file in the download of my album "HYMNAL" as Abandoned On Fire.  Adding here to promote discussion and hopefully get some more ideas for LSDJ noise.

HOW TO HEAPS NOISE: Sample abuse in LSDJ
By Arnie Holder a.k.a. Abandoned On Fire

The album that this pdf came with ( HYMNAL, http://datathrash.bandcamp.com/album/HYMNAL ) is based around
a single noise making technique. LSDJ already has hissy, grindy sample playback but when you start using those
samples or parts of those samples as waveforms for further synthesis things can get truly noisy in the best way
possible.

Let’s look at a few of the “noise synthesis” techniques used on HYMNAL, shall we?



Above is a phrase containing one of my favorite sounds from the album. It’s about mid-way through Hymn Of
Joyful Noise and lasts for several seconds, a pulsing and phasing type distorted sound.



Here’s the instrument screen. First, remember that the same sample is playing in both columns of the phrase.
Now look at the offset for each sample. They been “trimmed down” to different lengths and are both set to loop
so that they will go in and out of time with each other (also, in this case I set the playback to 50% for a deeper
tone).

The distortion field is where the “trial and error” phase of the process starts. With the cursor on the DIST field and
set to CLIP, hold A and tap LEFT twice or until the CLIP turns into ?CF00. You’ll immediately hear the volume of the
instrument go way up and it will usually get really staticy and distorted. Cool! Now continue to hold A and tap left slowly while listening to how the sound changes. You’ll go through sections where there may be no sound at
all or only a tiny crackle. Keep exploring, small changes can make an enormous difference. Ed. Tap up/down to move through values faster!



Everybody’s favorite topic, tables! This instrument has a very simple table but it demonstrates the most powerful
command for sample abuse. On KIT instruments, the S command changes both the loop length and offset. In this
case I’m only changing the length and with the H command I’m changing it on every tick. So every time the sample
loops (or even when it’s looping?) it will loop from a different point. And since each sample is set to a different
length they ... will loop ... different ... basically sound all jacked up, OK?

Not shown here but another good command for sample synthesis is the G command. Even if you don’t use
multiple grooves in your song, placing a G00 in your table will slow down the table speed to the phrase speed and
give your commands more time to act on the sound.

Hmmm, what’s some other fun stuff..... Oh! R commands on samples set up like above can create some amazing
sounds if you let them run for many many steps. Some of the most intense sounds on the album only happen after
16 or 32 steps of a retrigging sound. A good example of that would be around the middle of Hymn Of Loneliness,
you’ll know it when you hear it!

So, yeah. Get noisy! Load up the SAV that also came with the album and explore and debase it. Custom kits? Oh
hell yeah! But that’s a topic for another time.

Later.

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Abandoned on Fire

I always forget to mention that you can very quickly crash a dmg with this technique.  Gbc and newer is recommended.

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Abandoned on Fire

Bonus tip:

In a kit instrument's table, put this at the top of one of the effect columns

F01
H00

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Puerto Rico

When this album originally came out, I was really inspired to do more sample manipulation stuff on lsdj. I downloaded the save and writeup and immediately started playing. I ended up with this:
http://chipmusic.org/xuriik/music/calci … neal-gland

I thought I'd try getting this in tune this time, and figured I'd try using the monowave for single waveform synthesis... But TSP commands don't work on kits! So I was stuck using pitch bends creatively to hold more or less steady tones. It can get tedious and wasn't really working for me, but I still think the capability of having different timbres on a single kit is pretty neat. I experimented with this briefly, here (a sav, a kit, and an mp3; note that the kit is assigned to slot 36, or $24).

In that sav, each instrument from 01 to 20 is just the same monowave kit, with a length of 5, set to different offsets, increasing by 5 and then by 11 with each instrument. I don't really know how these offset values work, so I probably didn't cut up each waveform properly. I'd assume the sample is divided into FF equal parts, which means you pretty much have to wing it?

And the mp3 is me cycling through those instruments in live mode, playing the loop that's programmed in the sav.

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Abandoned on Fire

Sweet, I'll check your recordings out!

For tuning your kits use the pitch setting in the instrument screen. 01-8F pitches up, FF-90 pitches down with 8F being the highest and 90 the lowest which is sorta weird.

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Abandoned on Fire

Oh yeah, you've got some great sounds in there! I need to give monowave another shot. Used in piggy but only barely touched it as a kit.