Better support for drumkits in the sampler

Hi everyone,

after complaining about the lacking support for drumkits in Renoise for quite some while, I am starting to realize that using one instrument per drum (e.g. one kick instrument, one snare instrument, etc.) as opposed to one instrument for the whole drumkit, is not only a workaround (as I have seen it always), but it actually seems to be the intended way of taktik and crew to use drums in Renoise.
I think I can even see some benefits for this: The whole instrument logic is just moved one level down for complex instruments by splitting them up in logical units. Instead of having sample groups within an instrument (which do not exist in Renoise right now), you just have a separate instrument for each sample group. This gives a good overview of the structure of complex setups.

However, I can identify at least 3 major problems with this current approach (listed in order of severity, with the first one being the most problematic one):

There are cross-modulation and FX routing possibilities within the ensemble

I initially got this rather modular idea when looking at the way the virtual drumpads in Bitwig work. I don’t know, it might even be that this is exactly what taktik has planned. In this case: Awesome! If not, however, I would like to bring this idea (as well as the initial current problem it intends to solve) to taktik’s attention!

Thanks for listening, and let me know what you think of this.

That would be quite nice, especially for not drum samples.
There is the interesting feature of instrument tags that are accessible but not really implemented yet. I doubt that it’s just for indexed searching, why enter a tag when you can just name the instrument accordingly and place it in the right folder, and I doubt some kind of super fancy auto tagging system would be made that would be of any actual use.

But you can use virtual midi ports for now, it’s not as ugly as it seems, just rout the midi-in instruments to their specific track and have a separate track for your midi out. Then just mute the midi-in tracks in the pattern matrix. There are some issues, like un-following the edit cursor causes note input issues, since the column is already occupied and it cant fill a new column instead, but just the first one.

Yes, of course I can go around this. But the point of this thread is to get rid of the workarounds and maybe have a proper solution in the future.

Current multi-sampled instruments, drumkits are playable / record’able through keyboard or midi-controller, but individual sounds are not routed, automatically divided across columns / tracks for your desired individual mixing & effecting.
To have this would be great, but I think bundling of separate instruments in another extension, based under the assumption of ‘one instrument per drum’ is complexi’fying Renoise even more. Just because the current multi-sampled instrument set-up doesn’t fit your workflow, doesn’t mean ‘one instrument per drum’ is intended by the Renoise team imo. Clearly there are drumkits bundled with the install and people, like me, are using them extensively.

Would be cool to have more recording flexibility, be able to choose where each note-event from a multi instrument gets placed. Hope the devs figger something out regarding recording & routing inside the current set-up.

My personal workflow would certainly prefer routable single instruments! However, the routing is not the only thing that is problematic for creating complex drumkits with the current design. Since you cannot group samples (e.g. all your layered kicks) there is no proper and unified way to commonly affect parameters of samples that belong together (e.g. setting the volume of all layered kicks, relative to the other drums sounds, while keeping the relative volume between kick samples). So right now you have to chose between 1) self-containdness/playablitliy (a single instrument for the whole drumset) or 2) the ability to properly manage layered drums and mixing the drumset (individual instruments for each drum in the drumset). I want both at the same time. The current suggestion is one way to achieve this, which would be in line with the apparently intended current workflow (see demo songs etc.).