What made Renoise 'click' for you?

Evening all,

So I’ve come back from using too many daw’s, too many dj’s and not enough inspiration.

And what hit the spot - Renoise.

Why - that milage may vary for all - but for me, as someone who feels 80% ‘programmer’ the tracker interface is natural, the damn programme runs on almost anything netbook I’m staring at you and, the fucker don’t hold your hand.

Hex = feel the breaks, not read 'em.

The sheer amount of flexability, fun and enjoyment - even if just writing ideas, viewing rhythms - decoding favourite breaks, Renoise is relevant, worthwhile and blows my mind whilst keeping my fragile psyche at bay.

doffs hat to all involved, all who enjoy

-Thank-you for all - past present and future -

Been using Protracker on my Amiga 600 since I was 14. When i got a PC, everyone was making music using cakewalk or fruity loops. I hated it. I searched and searched, until one day. I found this heavenly thing called Renoise.

Some of my producer friends use FL Studio. I hate it. Painting and writing notes is not my thing. I rather type in notes with my computer keyboard

Some of my other producer friends use Ableton. I hate it. The apple-GUI hurts my eyes. And everthing is unlogical.

My grandpa use a guitar, but I can’t play a guitar.

So… that’s why.

pretty much anything I want to try out I can in one way or another with Renoise. Enjoyed actually the infrequent updates, makes you really learn a tool. And: it doesn’t come packed with a shitload of stuff I don’t care about. Struggling with some quirks of it, but hey… Oh, and it’s not trying to sell a lifestyle, like some other companies…

I was a FTII user in the mid/late 90’s and years later I missed a good tracker, even though I was also highly productive with other software.

So, when I saw Renoise, I had this mix of skepticism and euphoria… it looked promising, but how about actually using it?

Well, two hours after downloading I had produced a pretty good sounding chill drum&bass track, the kind you’d load up in the car when driving on the highway.

It all came down to the keyboard shortcuts, which were immediately recognizable and the overall responsiveness of the program. Renoise not only works like a tracker, it “feels” like a tracker :wub:

It became my main DAW after FL Studio dropped the per-step modulation drop-down menu and forced you into the piano roll for everything coupled with the (imo) difficult GUI and no vst support being offered with Geist 2.

Before that, the talk of “trackers take too long to get your head around” kept me away. It’s really not a nerdy piece of software, it is actually very user-friendly and quite intuitive/logical in many regards from a design and workflow perspective.

Their major fault is that they are not a sample-pack company who invented a DAW to sell their expansion packs and overpriced plastic controllers.

I decided one night that I wanted to do more with music than just editing, which I had been doing for years at the time. I remember trying out FL studio many years ago, but I never got into to it due to its upfront cost, and the interface was off putting. I went digging for reviews on many DAWs, and I estimated that Renoise and Reaper was the cheapest while still being good. I tried the Renoise demo, purely based on a coin-flip, but I loved the “playful” and tinkering approach that Renoise encourages, so I’ve stuck with it.

Anyways. I love it, and I hope development will continue.

The tracker.

It’s what I know. Tried other DAW’s, but never got into either of them. They’re obviously working just fine, I just know Renoise too well to leap over the hedge.

I searched “DAW + Tracker + Free” on Google, tested OpenMPT, was good but a bit limited, then I searched “DAW + Tracker” on Google, tested Renoise, fell in love. That’s all. And true that other DAW like FL Studio or Reaper are not so intuitive.

Yep. The tracker. I’m too old skool, too lazy and too bullheaded to learn, or want to learn, anything else. Folks, when you hit 60, as I have, you appreciate the time you have left.

I love Lua scripting too. Man, there’s just a ton of cool stuff you can do in Renoise with it.

… and samples. Lots and lots and lots of samples. I’ve got somewhere over 8G of the stuff, gotta play with it somewhere.

Cheers

I come from Ft2 and Renoise is based on that paradigm. To this day I still use the Ft2 setting in the space record/stop mode. Transitioning over was completely painless. I know that people that come from conventional DAW backgrounds can have a lot of trouble adapting to tracker workflow though.

I used milkytracker (almost exactly like ft2). I used it for a long time and still do. Its an awesome program because it can run on an old school PDA which is cheap and means I can write music out in the park or out in nature. Its a little limited though, no reverbs, no filters or those kind of effects. So when I’m indoors I use Renoise which is great for building sounds with a lot of effects and modulation.

I love the way renoise can run on older computers but can also push newer computers to the limit if you take it far enough with vstis, effects and so on.

Everything about the way renoise works is so logical. From the phrase functionality to the ability to have long modulation sets and fx chains per key or pad (i use a pad controller AKAI MPD218). I prefer not to use so many long samples but start simple building up the sound from single cycle waves taken from the wave generator tool and the morph synth (although its good to render plugins using plugin-grabber as well). I still use longer samples for drums and bass (but only ever one note or drumhit at a time).

I think renoise is definitely one of the best sampler-sequencers out there. Having said that it doesnt have time-stretch, grain pitch-shift, native synths or audio tracks (for recording guitar, vocals in long takes). People have trouble with trackers in general because of hex and the delay commands but using 12 beats per line saves a lot of trouble with delay commands when making triplets…

I would definitely recommend Sunvox, Milkytracker, G-stomper and Little Game Park tracker on PSP for composing outside in the park and Renoise + Sunvox for use on the computer while sitting at the desk at home. Make the single cycles in renoise, then export them to Milkytracker, G-stomper and Little Game Park Tracker for PSP. Use the free tuner called G-Tune to tune up the samples properly. Too many people write tracke music that is out of tune with other instruments but in tune with itself…I like to get the accuracy of a perfect A440Hz, no problem with renoises excellent fine tune functionality.

Another thing about renoise, its good to jam on the keyboard and record sequences that way. A lot of people only step sequence which is awesome too but those people who can play keyboard + drums really write music 20X faster…took me ages to figure that out, so now I’m learning keyboard and music theory too. Yeah, renoise is awesome…Cheap price, run on almost any computer, take it as far as you want, tracker layout less scrolling and mouse-clicks, more notes on screen, better for arps, better for phrases, sample layering, effects chains per key or pad…its better than ableton. it does have a few quirks as well.

Also I think people from the 16 step-sequencer crowd are gradually going to wake up to the fact that trackers were the right way for detailed editing, from the very beginning…16 step sequencers are awesome as well… But recently especially with some ios apps (not all) things have been so dumbed down, just wave your finger and music comes out…generative this and that…it leads to the misconception that all music which uses any form of electronic instrument is really easy and anyone can just press a button and a full composition comes out…

I also had many good hours with ft2 or similar progs in my childhood/youth, so renoise looked like some fun and nice distraction at first, I happily dived in. Sequencing feels very natural if you are used to ft2, yes it is very different than normal daws with piano roll and timline/clips.

Also having tried pianolols I like the tracker way much better, you have to get used to mapping scales etc in the head from the note names, but you have way better and more efficient visualisation of and control over - rhythm, concurrency, melodic/harmonic threads, etc.

Then I grasped the crazy powerful modulation system and how cpu cheap the dsp ist, and was sold to try to walk some way into the future with this program. Also the scripting interface is startig to lure me even more into the darkness…

I must also say, with its pretty much spartan ways, the program pleases my masochistic dispositions in a nice way. You can do everything with it, but you have to find out about how to and then actually do it yourself, all by yourself, in many painful endless hours of frustration, haha! Feels like a real hammer, nice and plain, the handle just a blackened bare metal frame, and no silly garnishment, not some plastic toy, though it is far from automatic and shiny like the toys or tools for the lazy ones use to be…

I used milkytracker (almost exactly like ft2). I used it for a long time and still do. Its an awesome program because it can run on an old school PDA which is cheap and means I can write music out in the park or out in nature. Its a little limited though, no reverbs, no filters or those kind of effects.

I’m interested in the idea of using Sunvox or Milkytracker on a PDA. What kinds of old school PDA would be suitable for this? I don’t know much about them.

I’d rather go for running the relevant progs on modern android or ios smartphones or tablets. the pda ages are over, and the processors in modern devices outperform the ones in the old pdas by lightyears while the battery can last much longer. A cheap phone/tablet is also cheaper than 2nd hand crappy old windows ce pda. but if you have one lying around, then…

I think my oldHP iPAQ hx4700 can do the job

Loving the replies and insight so far - just bringing my old netbook back to life to put linux + renoise on for portable sessions + zoom h2 for field recording…now, to ebay for a six cell battery!

HPiPAQ 214 enterprise for milkytracker (nice form factor, for use of the D-Pad + stylus navigation).

I would say sunvox is better on at least an 8" tablet (android is better for importing, organizing and rendering samples)

PSP3000 with halfbyte loader from wololo.net for Little Game Park Tracker (There is a sample called Monowave.wav, using that with lots of use of tables makes Little Game Park Tracker a really unique and great sounding wavescanning / wavetable type synthesizer…its a little technical with the HOP command and tick-counting AND “LooP OFset: Shift both the loop start & loop end values aaaa digits”).

OnePlus3T is a great phone for G-Stomper (Sampling electribe-style drum machine with VA-beast synth) which is a good design for smaller screens, also its nice and powerful with 6GB of RAM. Read the manual for G-stomper though, its a little complex, not so toy.

Commodore 64 music editors firstly, then later SoundTracker on the Amiga… Octamed… Cubase on Atari ST and then Octamed, Nuendo, Cubase and Ableton Live on PC etc for professional reasons. A long time passed.

Coming back to Renoise was like returning home - Warm and familiar. It reminds me of days when I knew so little about production that everything I did was entirely from feeling my way through… pure passion and wonder, inspired by the pros but having no idea what separated me from them … undefined goals and all the time in the world to wander through it all in rapture. Renoise brings me back to those days, reminds me of what it was that inspired me to fall down this rabbit hole in the first place.

Once you learn Renoise, there’s no goin’ anywhere else.

Around 2003 I was looking for a tracker that ran on OSX (Macintosh) to replace Fast Tracker II (that ran under DOS)

In 2005 Renoise was released for Mac.

Somewhere in between I was a compo participant, a forum complainer asking for my mac version, and a beta tester.

Now, I use Linux and Windows 10.