Glossary

The canonical language for this course. Where the wider chiptune world uses several words for one thing, this page picks one and lists the rest as aliases to avoid — that is how a subject gets smaller and easier to hold.

An entry appears here once you have used the idea correctly, not when it was first mentioned. A short glossary is a sign of an honest one.

The hardware

DMG: The original 1989 grey Game Boy, and the sound hardware this course treats as its reference. Later models sound near enough identical for our purposes. Avoid: Gameboy Classic, original Game Boy, GB

Channel: One of the four independent voices the DMG can sound at once — two pulse, one wave, one noise. Each plays a single note at a time. Avoid: Track, voice, instrument

Pulse channel: A channel whose waveform is high or low and nothing in between. The DMG has two of them, and the melody almost always lives on one. Avoid: Square channel, lead channel

Duty cycle: How many of a pulse wave’s eight steps are high, given as a percentage. The DMG offers 12.5%, 25%, 50% and 75%; the last two sound identical, so it offers three timbres. Avoid: Pulse width, wave shape, duty ratio

Note that FL Studio Mobile calls this pulse width on MiniSynth’s Modifier knob, and that is the same quantity. This course says duty cycle everywhere except when quoting the app’s own labels.

Sound

Harmonic: One of the pure tones stacked on top of a note — at twice its frequency, three times, four times, and up. Which harmonics are missing is what gives a waveform its character. Avoid: Overtone, partial, upper

Timbre: What makes two sounds playing the same note at the same volume still sound different. Avoid: Tone, colour, texture, character

Envelope: How a note’s volume moves from the moment it starts to the moment it dies — attack, decay, sustain, release. Chip leads normally have none worth speaking of: full volume instantly, silence instantly. Avoid: ADSR, volume curve, shape

Single-cycle waveform: An audio file containing exactly one repeat of a wave, meant to be looped by a synth to produce a pitch. The four files in assets/generated/ are single-cycle DMG pulses. Avoid: Wavetable, one-shot, sample

The course’s own names

Lead: The MiniSynth preset built in Lesson 1 — Pulse shape, no envelope, Mono voice mode. The voice that carries the tune.

Mono: A voice mode where the instrument plays one note at a time, overriding the previous one. Matches how a real Game Boy channel behaves, and is the default for chip voices here. Avoid: Monophonic, single-note, legato