Compose Music on Your Game Boy

When you can’t take your studio with you, turn your portable into a studio.

Handheld gaming devices aren’t just for children or for playing games. They can potentially be productive work devices! Okay, perhaps that’s hard to swallow, but you can use your Game Boy to make music. One of the top Game Boy utilities is Little Sound Dj.

Introducing Little Sound Dj

Johan Kotlinski’s Little Sound Dj (or LSDj) is very flexible and can enhance your musical ideas. It’s also very fast to use once you’ve learned how. Feature-wise, it boasts a soft synthesizer with resonant filters, sampled drum kits, and an internal speech synthesizer. All in all, it’s more like a portable music studio than anything else.

Little Sound Dj cartridges are hard to find these days, but occasionally show up on eBay. During the last year, used cartridges sold for between $150 and $350. You can also download a free demo version from http://www.littlesounddj.com/. There’s hope for some kind of reissue sometime in the future, though it’s likely it’ll still lack Nintendo’s imprimatur.

Alternatives to LSDj

The Nintendo Game Boy Camera ( [Hack #21] ) also features a small DJ game with very basic sequencing and sound-programming capabilities. Although it’s really a toy, this program aroused a lot of interest in making music on the Game Boy.

Jester Interactive developed the Nintendo-approved Pocket Music program for the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance. It is more capable than the Game Boy Camera but less fun, with a dull user interface that does not encourage creativity.

Oliver Wittchow originally created Nanoloop (http://www.nanoloop.de/) as a design school project. The program resembles a 16-step drum machine and is easy to use. It’s mostly useful for making experimental, loop-based music with spaced-out sounds. It is less useful for making traditional songs, because it lacks support for traditional music concepts such as instruments or notes; program it by moving dots around on a 16-step pattern.

Nanoloop did enjoy some independent production onto actual GB cartridges a few years ago, but now it’s hard to find except occasionally on eBay. There, used cartridges typically sell for between $50 and $100. The web site also promises to sell new cartridges for around $80 in the future, but they will run only on the Game Boy Advance.

Aleksi Eeben (http://www.cncd.fi/aeeben/) created the freeware Carillon music editor to produce music for games and demos, so the program focuses on making an efficient playback routine. Experienced users can compose good songs on the Game Boy. However, because its focus is technical rather than musical, the editor is not really a musician’s dream, even if it is a big step up from Pocket Music.

Running Your Music Editor

Some Game Boy music editors (notably LSDj and Carillon) have downloadable ROM image files. You can use these with a Game Boy emulator running on your computer or place them on a flash-ROM cartridge using a backup device connected to your PC.

Emulators can be nice in many ways. Of course, you won’t be able to use the program on the real thing, but the sound can be cleaner than on the original hardware, and you can easily perform backups to minimize the risk of data loss. The price is also much nicer (at least if you already have a computer), and the screen is likely to be more legible.

The recommended emulator for Windows is No$GMB (http://www.work.de/nocash/). For Mac OS X, KiGB (http://www.bannister.org/software/kigb.htm) works well. VisualBoy Advance (http://vba.ngemu.com/) runs well on several platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and BeOS. All these programs are free to use for emulating the classic Game Boy.

Finding a backup device to program your own cartridge can be difficult these days, as all production for the classic Game Boy has ceased. If you are lucky, you can find a used device. Look for the brands Transferer, Xchanger, E-Merger, or PC-Linker. An alternative is to use a Game Boy Advance backup device with the Goomba emulator (http://www.webpersona.com/goomba/).

If you are handy with electronics, you can also build your own cartridge. Reiner Ziegler put up a page with all the info you need at http://www.ziegler.desaign.de/readplus.htm. Be sure to see the Game Boy Dev’rs site (http://www.devrs.com/gb/) for all the technical information you could need about the Game Boy.

Getting Started with Little Sound Dj

Enough chat; let’s play.

First, download and install your choice of emulator. Then proceed to the Little Sound Dj file archive (http://www.littlesounddj.com/latest/) to download the files you need. There’s a demo version Game Boy ROM image in the demo folder and documentation in the documentation folder.

After starting LSDj, you’ll see a screen resembling Figure 2-2.

Figure 2-2. The LSDj song screen

The title at the top left of the window indicates that this is the song screen, the window in which you arrange your songs. The four columns with dashes each represent a Game Boy sound channel. There are two pulse wave channels, one custom wave channel (which uses sampled drum kits or soft-synthesized wave forms), and one noise channel. You can move between the different channels using the cursor key.

Little Sound Dj uses several screens, laid out on a 5 3 map found at the bottom right of the screen. The most useful screens are in the middle row, also called the main row. These are the song, chain, phrase, instrument, and table screens. The screens provide increasing levels of detail from left to right. The leftmost song screen presents an overview of the entire song, and the rightmost table screen shows detailed instrument programming. Navigate between the different screens by holding Select and pressing the cursor key.

The song, chain, and phrase screens control sequencing and work together in a tree-structure fashion. The phrase screen is a 16-step sequencer in which you’ll enter actual note data. The chain screen is a 16-step sequencer in which you can enter sequences of phrases to play. The song screen is a 256-step sequencer in which you enter sequences of chains.

Creating some noise

Navigate to the song screen and put the cursor on the PU1 column. Tap the A button twice to insert a new chain. The digit 00 should now appear at the cursor. Edit that chain by pressing Select plus Right to enter the chain screen. There, go through the same procedure. Tap A twice to insert a new phrase and press Select plus Right to reach the phrase screen.

Here you can enter notes. Move the cursor to the note column and press A to enter a note. The text C-3 will appear, C being the note and 3 the octave. Press Start to play back the phrase. Note how the phrase plays back from the top of the screen to the bottom. You can change the note value by holding A and pressing the cursor button. Pressing A plus Left or Right changes the note, and A plus Up or Down changes the octave.

You can now move the cursor up and down and insert more notes in other positions. To delete a note, press A while holding B. When you have finished listening, press Start again to stop the phrase.

The clean pulse sound might grow a bit dull after a while. Move on to the instrument screen by pressing Select plus Right.

The instrument screen is the place to make the sound a little bit more interesting. Change the envelope and wave fields by moving the cursor there and pressing A plus Left or Right. Modify the envelope setting from A8 to A3. Now press Start again to hear any change in sound. The sound amplitude should decay after the note plays.

The type field sets the instrument type. These instruments are specific to individual channels; pulse instruments play back only in the pulse channels, wave and kit instruments in the wave channel, and noise instruments in the noise channel.

Let’s try out the sampled drum kits. First, change to the wave channel. Return to the song screen, move the cursor to the wave channel, and create a new chain and phrase as you did before. Then, move over to the instr column in the phrase screen and tap A twice to insert a new instrument. Press Select plus Right to edit that instrument, change the instrument type to “KIT” by pressing A plus Right once on the type field, then return to the phrase screen. Now you should be able to enter drum sounds in the same way that you entered notes before.

LSDj automatically stores songs in the battery-powered SRAM, so you don’t have to save them explicitly. Version 3 also has an option to store several songs on one cartridge. Find this feature in the project screen located above the song screen.

If you want to back up your creations, use either a backup device connected to your computer or the independent Mega Memory Card (typically found for a few U.S. dollars on eBay). The easiest way to record your song to send to friends is to use the headphone output as input to a recording device.

Table of Contents for
Gaming Hacks

Compose Music on Your Game Boy

Introducing Little Sound Dj

Running Your Music Editor

Getting Started with Little Sound Dj

Creating some noise

See Also

Table of Contents for Gaming Hacks

Compose Music on Your Game Boy

Introducing Little Sound Dj

Running Your Music Editor

Getting Started with Little Sound Dj

Creating some noise

See Also

Table of Contents for
Gaming Hacks