LSDJ Irregular Length Chains

How many phrases is chain 00 and your accompaniment? If 00 has the same amount of phrases as your accompaniment 8 times, it might be easier to just split that solo up into 8 equal-length parts in 8 different chains, i.e. make chains 00-08 and have each one hold the same number of phrases as 20.

If you don't care about having all your chains line up exactly during playback you can just get rid of the FE chains altogether as well and everything will work, since LSDJ handles each channel's playback independently of the others. The behavior you have with those phrases might be a bug, but there's really no need to make "empty" chains in this case.

Last edited by VCMG (Jun 4, 2016 3:46 am)

If you want your stuff to line up, copy whatever is in 20, 40  and 60 to make them the same length as chain 00, so you just have one really long 01 20 40 60 on the first row of the song screen instead of a ton of 20 40 60s and one really long 01.

The H command isn't meant to be used this way, lol. Using it like this wouldn't make it Hop all the way down from Row 02 to Row 09 on the Song screen simply because you copied the phrase 7E -- which contains H00 in the first row -- over and over. In theory you're just making it jump from one 7E phrase to the next once per tick and it's just going so fast that it appears to be skipping two rows.

Sometimes you just want to have things automated to work well and watch the numbers and letters roll by, hehe "why would you even want to make a thing automatically do what you want it to do instead of having to fiddle with a bunch of buttons to do it manually?" well for one, it's nice to not have to fiddle with live mode buttons while playing an instrument along with the sounds of the gameboy.

Last edited by SketchMan3 (Jun 4, 2016 1:43 pm)

Basically, no, you can't use the Hop command that way. That's not the way it works. It won't skip directly to the end of the sequence of 7E chains because the Hop command has to Hop from one phrase to the next. It doesn't skip the Phrase that it's hopping too just because it's the same chain as the one that came before it. And empty chains wouldn't work because there's no Phrase to play, so it's null. Kinda like trying to press Play on the the song screen on a row that's just -- -- -- --.
"I was avoiding that because i wanted to save space on the song screen. Makes it faster to cycle through the song."
You can't have your cake and eat it too. VCMG's suggestion of breaking up the solo into smaller chains would make cycling through the song faster and easier. Having the solo in one long 01 chain on PU1 makes it impossible to start the solo at any point other than the beginning if you want it to be synced up with the chains on the rest of the channels. Plus you're not saving any [physical] space (which is what I assume you meant by that) on the song screen because you still have a huge block of
20 40 60
20 40 60
20 40 60
20 40 60
20 40 60
20 40 60
etc...
Along with the single 01 followed by a ton of 7Es.

"That what i was doing until now. The problem is that i'm running out of chains (in this song i combine the phrases in many different ways) and in this way i have to use two chains for the same musical ideal. I would have to use, for example: 20, 40 and 60 to a single bar idea and 21, 41 and 61 to the same idea repeated 8 times."
The solution to running out of chains is to use LONGER sequences of phrases per chain, actually (maybe throw in some more variation too for good "measure" while you're at it? ) for example, if you have 16 slots in your chain, and you have two ideas that use only 4 slots, you can put both of those ideas in one chain TWICE instead of breaking them up into two separate chains for two separate ideas. You can still economically combine the phrases in many different ways while using unique Chains for each variation. Just use up all that chain space with more phrases, man.

You kind of just have to incorporate a compromise between all the suggestions to find a balance between Phrase length, ease of navigation, and keeping everything lined up.

Last edited by SketchMan3 (Jun 4, 2016 2:18 pm)