(This article was written by bitman and the full article can be read here: http://www.noisechannel.org/10861)

Preface

Ear training is often referred to as a tedious task for classically trained musicians and jazz musicians alike. Many would argue that it is hard to develop such skills for chipmusic or other kinds of composition. What you hear in your head or in other artists’ songs – from drum noises to beautiful pulse leads and heavy WAV bass – is entirely possible to realize once you familiarize yourself with the abilities of your tools and your brain, just like any other musician. Part of the trade is learning how to make sounds we imagine (or stumbling upon them), the other is identifying the notes and rhythms we hear.

For this guide, I won’t put you through a bunch of music theory crap that there are links for. If you really want to learn about music theory, there is my favorite link of choice in the “P.S.” section. Later there will be lots of elaboration on basic music theory. I’ll do my very best to relate everything in music theory to something actively related to chip music. Given, it won’t be the easiest of things to do – often I will ask you to hold my hand as you jump over the WAV or Pulse channel cliff with me and plummet to our new destination at the bottom. Often you will have to look up from where we “fell” to understand why the cliff was so high up. Then we will climb to the top of the cliff, and then go find another place to sink our curiosity into.

I am writing this string of articles in effort to make a wiki for noisechannel.org and consolidate information from various sources so that it is easier to gather substantial information on everything to do with chipmusic, starting with the Gameboy platform. The Gameboy music scene is one that is a very common starting point for most chip musicians, and like the musicians I hope to see these guides branch out beyond the Gameboy. I hope that noisechannel may host wiki articles to help prolong the life of the scenes and foster the start of new ones. Chip music is something I hold dear to my heart, and something I want to teach others about. Seeing as LSDJ is my primary chipmusic software, it will be covered first. Later I may work on articles for things such as Famitracker, Deflemask and SunVox, but for right now it is best that we start with simple interfaces and “simple” synthesis.

Before We Get Started

In LSDJ we are given three kinds of channels – Pulse channels, a WAV channel, and a Noise channel. All the channels are monophonic (which means we can make only one sound at a time on each channel). All the channel types have their own unique sounds, instrument formats, and commands. For now we will focus on each channel…
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