My first live set with renoise - general questions

Heyo renoise community;

I just finished my 4. tune with renoise and now I got the opportunity to perfrom them live in a month. Makes me damn happy but also very nervous! So right now I’m preparing my live set of the four songs - now I’ve got several questions.

First to my music: I make some kind of Reggae/Dancehall oriented music. Most of the time I’m singing in my mother tongue which is swiss-german (rap/toasting/singing). Sometimes I play guitar (over an amp) or some melodies with synthesizers via a small midi keyboard(behringer UMX 250).

I decided to use four instances of renoise (one for each song) which works pretty well. What I had to do first was to set up CopperLan, because I wanted to use one (or two) midi controller for each song (each instance).

This was very good described by danoise in this thread (with CopperLan-Screenshots, give thanks!), so it was pretty easy -> https://forum.renoise.com/t/multiple-instances-of-renoise-and-live-midi-controlling/39031

But with all songs opened, the four synths played by the midi keyboard we’re playing at the same time. My solution was to midi map the pre master volume. Now I can start with the first tune and when its over I stop it and lower the volume to zero. Then I make the the second song to full volume and hit start. And so on …

Question 1 : I don’t know if this is a good way to do such a thing, but it works quite good - what do you think about that in general?

Questions 2 : I never did such a thing (my first gig) - so I don’t know how I should use the microphone. Shall I go over the USB interface (the guitar I think I just can play it live via an amp)? Or is this just done live at the location via the mixer there? Shall I use just some reverb? In my songs the vocals go through some dsp-fx (compressor/reverb/eq/ …) - what’s you’re experience?

Question 3 : You’ll propably know, that it’s possible to create loops in the pattern sequencer; from the manual:

"Looping Patterns:

Using the column to the immediate left of the pattern numbers, you can cause a pattern or sequence of patterns to loop. Left-click and drag in this column to indicate the patterns you want to loop. To remove a loop just click on a single slot twice. Clicking here next to a section header will automatically select all of the patterns in that section."

I think it isn’t possible to midi map that function? It also seems not possible for example to loop four patterns at a point in the song and also loop another section of four later in the song? And another thing: when I mark for example four patterns, this is not saved, so I had to do it before I play live? Do you know a good work around for my problem?

Question 4 : I first thought of one big renoise file containing all songs. But there is no function to “import” one renoise song into another?

Thats all for the moment. Thank’s for you’re help!

Robin

No real live experience with renoise, though I would personally keep the mic separate. If you have fx (hardware), i would run the mic into that and have a cable out for the sound eng. 1/4 jack should be fine. Unless it is triggering something or you want the vocals to be affected by renoise/software etc.
If you wanted a specific sound then by all means add your own reverb, it does work well with vox, imo subtlety is best as the vocal is usually the thing that generally stands out most in front, unless you are after a specific effect, too much reverb may push the vocals back in the mix.

thanks Abissus for the nice tips!

the gig was in september, but I still want to share my experience.

I was worrying for nothing. At the small bar/club I just connected my usb interface with my computer and with the mixer. Microphone and bass were also plugged to the mixer (reverb on the mic) and everything sounded well to my beats which were coming from the laptop. I had six instances of renoise opended an started/stopped the songs with a midi controller (launch control). I played different synths within the different songs - copperLan is awesome. I played guitar through an amp, that was enough for the small location and also mixed good with the rest of the sound. Everything worked, even though I thought something must go wrong with this kind of “set up” and no experience … but renoise seems very very reliable! I just love it … ahh and I played at 02.30 in the night, so everyone was drunk or high and the ambience was perfect … ^.^

what I want to try another time is to automate reverb/delay/otherFX for the voice in renoise. But I think this only works live if you have a very very good usb interface with no latency that not crackles at lower buffer sizes.

-I still dont know if i can loop more sections of patterns controlled by midi. (question 3) so if someone knows the anwer i’ll be glad!

-for making a live set in one big awesome renoise file, I just have the thought to render every song and load them as samples in a new one - but then you have to exactly automate the bpm on the master track … I think thats not a bad solution and I probably will try this approach out.

-I still dont know if i can loop more sections of patterns controlled by midi. (question 3)

Not all MIDI mappings are visible on the screen when you hit CTRL+M. A lot only exist in the MIDI-mapping dialog itself.

Try searching for “looping”, and you’ll see a number of mappings for sections in the pattern sequence.

Those mappings allow you to loop any of these sections (well, up to 64 I think), as well as selecting the next and previous ones.

Btw: I had a brief talk with Hitori Tori, it was quite interesting because he’s always been using scheduled pattern triggers for his performances, and wasn’t aware of the sections.

We kind of agreed that the current way could be improved by adding an additional method which “carries over” the active (playing) section, when you’re selecting another one. Because, right now it just loops that section but doesn’t change the playback position.

Nothing fancy, just one less button to press / worry about … but that can mean a great deal while playing