Switch 2, sure, but — have you plugged a tiny piano into a Nintendo DS and used some powerful homebrew software and custom scripts to make a handheld experimental music instrument?
Audio Wanderer sent this in and it got lost in my July inbox, but the results are sonically wonderful, and there’s a charm to seeing this tiny piano keyboard and game console.
Dive in for some glitchy chillout / ambient sounds.
You almost certainly haven’t heard of Easy Piano, but it was produced by now-defunct Bellevue, Washington-based game developer Valcon Games (active 2005-2011). And some copies are still floating around. You might want to take care if you pick it up, as it seems there was a separate version for the DS, if I'”m reading ‘m reading descriptions right. (Then again, the kind of person who would attempt this probably has multiple variants of the DS at home!)
Here are the ingredients to make this work:
- Easy Piano DS, a 2009/2010 title developed by US game developer Valcon Games (the game pack comes with the keyboard accessory)
- Camden Flannagan’s WaveTableSynth homebrew (built-in Easy Piano support)
- CellDS via AudioWanderer’s own custom scripts, available on Patreon (CellDS has an awesome Lua scripting interface)
This gets into some Deep CDM History, as the CellDS developer appeared at events I ran in New York under the name Handmade Music/MusicMakers in the late 2000s.
Camden’s app is overlooked and excellent, in fact — worth checking out with or without the accessory. It even features standard SFZ export for use of the instruments you create in other software.
I almost hesitate to write this up, as now I kind of covet this cute little keyboard. But sharing is caring, and I trust our CDM audience not to inflate the used prices too much.
Enjoy! Put that old gear to use. Be weird, and small, and handheld. I guess this counts as DAWless? Kids today…