I’ve been teaching myself the ways of the surprisingly robust Little Sound DJ, a composition tool and music tracker for the Nintendo Game Boy. Coming off the musical high of working with the Apple Sisters, I wanted to keep pushing my brain towards musical endeavors. I got seriously inspired watching the chiptune documentary, Reformat the Planet, and I’d thought I’d try my hand at some 8 bit music.

It’s been interesting. The learning curve on LSDJ is not bad for a program on a system with only 8 buttons. It would’ve been wildly unsuccessful as an actual Game Boy game, because you really do need to read the manual and know how to navigate it, etc. What really shocks me though is how broad the functionality of the program is. Considering the Game Boy is a 20 year old piece of techonology, it’s impressive that you can have it run all of this wave synthesis and so forth with surprisingly complex sound.

I nabbed an old school GB off of ebay the other day, so as soon as I feel comfortable enough with it, I’m going to get the necessary equipment to make my own carts and start playing music off of it. My goal is to come up with a few songs and maybe play an open mike night. There’s a popular one down the street from my apt. that I’d like to perform at if I get some material I like. At the moment I’m torn between whether to keep it all on the Game Boy or to play bass under whatever melody/beat combo I come up with. I assume this will resolve itself when I’ve got things a little more fleshed out. Right now my compositions are more “ringtone” than “actual song.”