Up until using renoise etc. I was mostly using hardware sequencers, Triton, MC303 etc, where I used to build up drum beats by looping patterns.
I know its possible to do this on Renoise, but I was wondering whether this method would be as tight timing wise as using a dedicated groovebox.
Having used Cubase etc, on friends computers shows that recording a loop within these programs tends to be sloppy and a bad method compared to drawing patterns in with a mouse on a drum grid.
What are peoples thoughts on this?
Is it possible to achieve the same ‘tightness’ within Renoise using the looping method I’ve described.
What would be an ideal setup, ie soundcard midi interface for a midi keyboard, for it to work?
Thanks.
PS. How do you folks do drum pattern recording on renoise?
If the loops 0are tight the timing should be tight, too. By the way using a multichannel in /-out card with renoise would enhance your setup. So you are able to use renoise as a sequencer together with additional samples and Vstis as well as your grooveboxes.
The Renoise pattern, or any tracker for that matter, can be seen as a grid consisting of 64 lines (by default). Then each line represents a 1/16 note, but the resoltion can of course be decreased or increased. Many people actually use trackers especially to create drum loops because of the superior simplicity and control and then use the loops in another program’s arranger. A tracker is much more sofisticated than a drum grid and not that much more complicated to learn.
And about sloppy… I don’t see why it should be sloppy at all. With cubase you just have to quantize the recording afterwards, which you won’t with hardware sequencers, drum grids or Renoise.
Sorry, I guess I should have been more descriptive when I wrote sloppy.
What I mean by sloppy is that: when using a Korg Triton or a groovebox, and entering the notes through the keyboard you’re only dealing with the OS of the Triton, thats all.
When using Renoise you’re going through Windows, Renoise, ASIO, midi keyboard, soundcard/midi interface etc which mean more latency…
But what are people, who have used grooveboxes and then Renoise, experience from this ?
I still dont get you :
Do you want to control your drumboxes … via renoise or do you just asked how the workflow in Renoise is, when creating drumpatterns by using samples ?
And about latency : Well, if you have a good soundcard and using ASIO, you can have letencies down to a ms. This ms is something you also get by just putting the speakers a few meters from you (martin might calculate us the exact distance : ) , so this reason is really no longer valid. It was in the 80`s where the first music apps had latencies of about half a second.
I think he is referring ti MIDI latency, which is a known problem when using sequencers. the problem is that MIDI is a rather old standard and is using rather slow bitrates. there are tutorials around which explain how to setup songs midi-wise, so that drums and samples with a fast attack are tight and other instruments with slow attacks get a lower priority.
I once read an article about these things and they wrote that (if I remember right) if you fire off 30 notes at the same time using MIDI you get a serious delay between the first and the last note just because of the slow connection-speed when using MIDI-cables, and this delay might increase when you patch midi-signals through different hardware-machines or programs.
if this is the question you have I can only say that renoise is as good as any other program out there, like cubase or similar.
Yeah thanks Looza, thats what I exactly what I meant Midi latency of grooveboxes compared to Renoise.
I guess the only way Im gonna find out for sure is when I get a decent soundcard and everythiing set up with the right drivers.
I suppose getting your drumloops to sound right is by trial and error.
Taktik: no I dont want to control the drum boxes from renoise, cause Renoise is far better with sample manipulation etc, which is why I would wanna use it in the first place.
