DMG, How I Loveth Thee

While working on our upcoming C64 demo (upcoming as in, the one we've had in the works for about a year, and it may be another year before the dang thing's finished, hehe), I realized all the SID tunes I had done myself were rather mediocre. I started looking for other sources of inspiration (aside from the usual C64 prods I've seen far too many times). What did I find? Gameboy demos. They had the flavor of C64 demos but a nicer pace, and the sound had something special to me. This is not to say I'd give up on the C64 prod - far from it. But of course, I started looking into this alien system.

Codename DMG - Dot Matrix Game, this little beast boasts a 25x25 character screen (similar to that of the C64), something like 40 sprites, 4-colors with a square pixel ratio, and my personal favorite: 4-channel audio. More specifically, the audio consists of two pulse wave generators, a sampler-like wavetable channel, and a white noise generator. This sure doesn't sound like much, especially compared to the extensive capabilities of the C64's SID channels, but as I said before, it had something special.

I started looking into more of this DMG chip music stuff and found a few artists I really liked, including cTrix (whom I had met at @Party, though hadn't realized his influence on the modern chip scene until now), Nordloef, Sabrepulse, Anamanaguchi, and others. Each of these artists brought something unique to the table, but everything marked "LSDj" still caught my eye. So, I looked into that aswell.

LSDj - Little Sound Dj is a DMG program that allows you to produce music in a tracker-style interface on the system itself, which I thought was really cool. Not to mention that I had started my demoscene music career with good old Modplug Tracker (now called OpenMPT), and I really do love trackers in general :) . I grabbed a DMG emulator and the LSDj demo and, within hours, had fell in love. At the risk of sounding like a cheesy 3AM infomercial, this program was a total dream to work with; I found the interface navigation to be very intuitive and the features of the program were impressively extensive. Pictures:

Pictures from http://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/ .

The closest experience I can relate it to is actually my 4K synth, Sonant 2, which is nice, since the workflow in my synth was designed for my needs specifically. Being that they were so similar, I had picked up the software quite rapidly. Within days I had my own full copy of LSDj and a DMG USB cart in the mail :) .

The results? Well, among others, Sidchain is a song that I'm quite proud of. For using LSDj for less than two weeks, I'm very much happy with what I've accomplished. In addition, it looks like I'll be playing my tracks at a little house party on the 30th, which is very exciting for me :) . It will be my first electronic performance ever, and I must say I'm honored to go into battle wielding the infamous grey brick. Obviously, pictures/videos (whichever I end up with, hehe) will be posted :) .

Until next time.