Hey,
if I edit a vst synth using one mono track, legato / portamento / slide doesn’t work. Instead I have to arrange the notes on two columns and set note-offs at the height of each note. So I guess the automatic note-off happens slightly before the next note, what is a wrong behavior, isn’t it?
I don’t consider it a bug (although of course only renoise team can say for sure).
Portamento happens when you play one key while holding down another… but if you are in a mono track, two keys don’t get held down at once. There’s a note off and then a note on, as you say.
If consecutive notes led to portamento, then how would you write notes without it? You’d have to have explicit note offs every time, right?
It makes sense to me this way… to do portamento, you just create a second column and put the note there (as you’ve seen).
Some vstis wil portamento if you skip the note off in the single column track. It depends on the vsti though, they don’t all behave the same.
Hm, but if a VST supports polyphonic portamento, things will become complicated (a.k.a. huge track columns).
I believe, two notes in the same track column should behave exactly the same as two notes in two columns, but with a note-off at the next note row… At least for VST / MIDI.
Maybe this thread should be moved into bugs-section…
You can watch behaviour with a midi monitor, telling renoise to use a midi port as output for an instrument. When successive notes in a note column happen, it will simultaneously send off for the old note and then on for the new note. But the off command is always sent first, breaking legato modes. I already know that effect, and you can circumvent by using another note column and overlapping notes of a mono synth - glides will work then (like you’ve experienced). But it’s tedious to sequence such shit.
I feel that this is no “bug” per se, it’s just logical to have default behaviour turn off a note before triggering the next to not have notes “overlap”.
My suggestion would be to introduce some pattern “trick”, i.e. an effect command in some column, or using omission of the instrument number (like used by trackerstyle stuff to not retrig env and such), or generally a switch reversing the behaviour so you have to specify which note would be sent an off first. Using the “mono” mode could work, too, but often I find I wish to mix retrig and portamento in a line, so either all retrig or all portamento is a weak option.
You can watch behaviour with a midi monitor, telling renoise to use a midi port as output for an instrument. When successive notes in a note column happen, it will simultaneously send off for the old note and then on for the new note. But the off command is always sent first, breaking legato modes…
I feel that this is no “bug” per se, it’s just logical to have default behaviour turn off a note before triggering the next to not have notes “overlap”.
Hm but what if the new note-on would be send first and then immediately the note off for the last note? Would this result in an overlap?
On the other hand, it’s the same in other daws, as far as I remember. You have to overlap the note bars for portamento there.
Yes I think so, it’d depend on the synth, but usually they’ve just got a logic to track some held note when a new one is triggered in mono/legato mode and do a glide from that note when it is. I’ve already witnessed some nice effects in some synths when holding more than one note while triggering a new one, you’ll never know how the logic is actually working.
I’d pledge for some flag to control the behaviour for single note-column porta action, like the glide button on a 303 you could mark notes that would glide from the last one, others would send off first like the current behaviour is. Many synths also have modes to always glide from the last note, even when no note is held when a new one is triggered.