Using Renoise while playing with a live band

Hi there,

Some musical friends have expressed an interest in going down the rehearsal studio and jamming along using some stuff programmed into Renoise. However, I’m not quite sure how we would go about doing such a thing?

A bit of background:

We’ve played in bands many times and are used to going down the studio and jamming. However, this has only ever been done with guitars and bass guitars hooked up to their amps, drums and vocals through a PA system. Standard (amateur ) rock set up.

What we’d like to do is play with guitar, bass, drums and vocals but with Renoise pumping out some electronic stuff. However, I’m not sure how you would do this? The two main problems I can imagine are:

  1. Amplifying Renoise to match the other instruments. You’d obviously need to get the laptop running Renoise hooked up to something so you could play along at the same (pumped up) volume. Do you plug into a PA? Or an amp?

  2. The drummer would need to keep in time regardless of weather a beat is playing or not. I imagine the drummer would need some sort of click track which is sent to them separately?

If anyone has some tips for getting this set up or knows of a good website with a tutorial that would be great!

Thanks!

Get an audio interface with at least three outs. Use two outs to send a stereo mix to a mixer or amp. Use the third to send a click track to the drummer. Route Renoise’s main outs to the stereo out of the sound card, and route the click track to its own audio out.

Get an audio interface with at least three outs. Use two outs to send a stereo mix to a mixer or amp. Use the third to send a click track to the drummer. Route Renoise’s main outs to the stereo out of the sound card, and route the click track to its own audio out.

Is it possible to send the actual metronome click to a separate out, or would it be click samples used as a click track?

Is it possible to send the actual metronome click to a separate out, or would it be click samples used as a click track?

I have a friend who’s adrummer. He exclusively uses Renoise for clicktracks, and they never sound like something you could achieve with the metronome.

Different parts with different meters, and other weird stuff… they’re basically like little songs on their own :smiley:

That said, additional output would be a nice feature - especially for prehearing stuff!

This is something I’m doing for quite a long time.

All the advices above are right. My two cents:

  • get a MIDI keyboard and some controllers. Playing live without them is a pain.
  • if Renoise will play bass, route it to its own audio out and connect it to bass amp if you can.