3/4 measure in a 4/4 measure song

hello everybody hopefully you can help me with my question. I’m not English but i try to make my question as clear as possible:

currently i’m working on a song in renoise, with a lot of percussion. Now i need to make a break in the song with the persucion but i dont see how i can do this.

1 normal count in my song obtains 8 blocks. this means i can fill one count with eight 1/8 notes, and al notes devided bij 2, when equallly devided.

But i would like to put three ticks in one count, equilly devided. just like when you set the song to 6 blocks in one count. But because my song is in 8 blocks, i would like to make one track in 6 blocks. Is this possible? or this maybe possible in another way.

i hope you understand my question.

thanx for the help!

:drummer:

it seems like a question for me B)

first advice:
every time you can, use speed 12
12 can be divided by 1,2,3,4 and 6… sort of magic number, isn’t it? :)

second advice:
when you need 4 ticks per row in a block on a track, and 3 ticks per row in the same block on another track, the fastest solution is:

  1. change the speed (not BPM!) from X to X/3
  2. add 2 rows for each row in the block
    now you can put all the notes where needed.

Other solutions need the use of note delay command which is even more difficult to explain on a forum (at this hour, expecially :wacko: )

If you want a 3/4 measure (as the title says), all you have to do is change the patternlength to 3/4 of the regular size, ie 30hex instead of 40hex.

If you want to make triplets, ie three notes in one beat or three notes in a half beat, then use speed changes. If you change it from speed 6 to 4, then three lines will occupy 34=12 ticks, the same as two lines with speed 6 (26) . The same with speed 3 -> 2. And change the patternlength to suit your needs.

ok the first advice i already tryed, but the number of 12 is an strange and irritating number to work with… (my op[inion offcourse) and it does not allow me to make a block of 16 counts.

but anyway… the second advice sound very good. but here a question. what i understand from your advice is that i can adjust the speed per block… and not that it will chance the speeds of the entire song? when i change the speed… the speed of the entire song changes. can i do this for just one block??

the setting you are changing is the default spped, which is the initial speed value.

You can change the speed/BPM of a song at any time using the
F0xx track command, where:
if 00 <= xx <= 1F, it changes the speed to xx
if 20 <= xx <= FF, it changes the BPM value to xx

for example,
F013 sets the speed to 13 hexadecimal (19 dec)
F0A0 sets the BPM to A0 hex (160 dec)

I suggest you to check ReNoise help file in your ReNoise installation directory to see a complete list of all ReNoise track commands.

In Renoise a block is any selection you can make with the mouse, but that’s probably not what you mean. Do you mean just for a single track (one column) or for a short section of the entire song (all of the instruments, for just a few rows)?

If you mean rows then yes, you can change the speed of just that section. If you mean you want to change the speed of a single track (column) so that it plays triplets while the rest of the song keeps its tempo, prepare for a long-winded lecture.

BPM should be a pretty familiar idea to you, but speed is probably not very clear to any new trackers, and the Renoise documentation isn’t great at explaining this (unless “Speed is a speed factor as known from Amiga trackers or FastTracker2” means something to you).

You may have noticed that lowering the speed makes the song move (a lot) faster. Probably not what you’d expect. Speed is actually the number of ticks assigned to each row of your pattern, and that’s all.

Ticks are mostly used for effects, but they’re very important. For example, when you change the length of the volume envelope on an instrument, the numbers under the envelope tell you how long, in ticks, the envelope will last. So if you set the length of the whole envelope to 6 (very short) it will take 6 ticks to play. With the default song speed setting of 6, this means that the whole envelope will play once (all 6 ticks) in one single step (1 step = 1 row of the pattern). If you turn the song speed down to 2, the song will play 3 times faster because each step is playing for only 2 ticks instead of the original 6. Accordingly, the 6-tick-long envelope you made will take 3 steps to play (2 ticks per step), instead of just 1 step (6 ticks per step).

I hope that makes sense, because here’s where we get to changing the time signature for just one column… sort of. It-Alien mentioned note delay as hard to explain… no kidding. ;) But if you understand ticks, then you can understand note delay. It’s effect 0d0x, and it delays the note trigger by x number of ticks after it’s set. So, your speed is 6 and each step represents a 16th note. You can play a 32nd note by using a note delay of 0d03, delaying the note for 3 ticks, or half of a step. A 64th note could not be done with this setup, because you’d have to delay for 4.5 ticks (impossible), which is why It-Alien suggested a speed of 12 instead of 6.

This piece of a track at speed 6:

c-3 … … 0000
… … … 0000
c-3 … … 0000
… … … 0000
c-3 … … 0000
… … … 0000
c-3 … … 0000
… … … 0000

Would be a triplet with:

c-3 … … 0000
… … … 0000
c-3 … … 0d04 <— delay 2/3rds of a step
… … … 0000
… … … 0000
c-3 … … 0d02 <— delay 1/3rd of a step
… … … 0000
… … … 0000

I hope this was more useful than stupid. ;)

:D well thank you very much!!

i have succeded!! (y)

but why isn’t it possible just to chance one tracke like Native said. Is that really impossible to make?

it would be impossible to use

you would get mad after 2 patterns, believe me…

Even I could resist as long as for 4 patterns :D :rolleyes:

Yeah, I don’t see this being impossible to do… although I’m sure whoever is writing the gui code won’t like us for suggesting it! :P

I’d really love to see this feature go in… Even if its just hard coded to only give certain variations (even just a 4/4 and 3/4 switch would do).

Eddie

If this is to be done, making it more general than 4/4 vs 3/4 won’t be a big deal. With zooming implemented the right way, it might not be a big deal at all, but I’ll have to think about that…

But I have a few questions to this concept.
For zooming the whole pattern we can have some shortcuts:

  • Zoom 2x in
  • Zoom 2x out
  • Zoom from X viewed lines per normal line to X+1
  • Zoom from X viewed lines … to X-1
  • Zoom all out
  • Zoom to editstep grid
    other ideas?

Should editstep be kept as X lines like now, using the current size of the lines from the zooming level, or should it be changed to ll.dd (line.delay) and used independent of the zooming level? So a 1 line editstep will move 3 lines if you zoom in 3x. Using fractions in the editstep (ie 01.80hex = 1.5dec) can then be used to automatically set a delay for inserted notes.

How can your idea of independent zooming in each track be handled? There could be similar shortcuts applying to a single track. Should patternzoom shortcuts apply to all tracks or only to the tracks you haven’t zoomed individually? Perhaps a shortcut “reset individual trackzooming” to reset all tracks to the same zooming level.

I guess you’d want to zoom all the tracks together really. You would just have an extra scaling factor on tracks with different time signatures, so you can see where the notes of one track are in relation to another.

Zoomnig individual tracks would probably cause big headaches, as you’d start to lose how the patterns related to each other (esp. in tracks with different time signatures). Unless you included the line number with each track too? But then that would eat up more valuable screen space…

It’d be really cool if this feature makes it in! Would renoise be the first tracker to support such a thing?

Hey! Your discussion about tempos made me remember “the old Amiga-days!”

In the very end of this age, a new and very innovative tracker was released. I can not for the love of god remember what it was called, but it built on a very nifty multi-tracker kinda interface. You had the usual pattern-editor, but the length of the pattern was independent of the length of other patterns, and the pattern only consisted of one column.

Now, instead of composing a pattern consisting of say 8 tracks of equal length, you took those independently sized patterns and pasted them into a sequencer-like thing. The sequencer, which had 8 tracks, allowed each track to run at its own speed, and thus each track was running truly independent of the other tracks. You could even loop one of the tracks while the other tracks kept on playing. If you pieced together a cool drum-sound out of samples, you could simply have it in its own track and loop it over and over as many times as needed while the rest of the song played on.

I have never seen this kind of tracker since then, but maybe it’s still a good idea? I know I really liked it back then…

I don’t think it is a good idea: not everyone is composing “cut&paste” music where the same 4/4 bassline goes over and over.

Sad but true <_<

well not everyone’s composing chip-tunes, and yet the old-school arpeggio-function is there… :rolleyes:

that’s not exactly the same thing:
you can either use arpeggio or not, but turning ReNoise into a track-based tracker, instead of a pattern-based one, would make it impossible to compose anything but dance music.

if you give a look to the songs page, you will see that there’s more out here…

Well, I was a coder on Music 2000 on PlayStation, which was pretty much a track based tracker. You can definitely do more than just dance music on that.

Still, I wouldn’t like to see renoise go down that route though, I find the current renoise set up much more useable.

Eddie

I just wanted to say that even the simple example native gave, with nothing else than being able to do 3/4 over 4/4 in individual collums, even without zooming or anything, would be amazingly usefull. :yeah:

/Mutant

Hi, I have a good idea of how this could be implemented without zooming… zooming wouldn’t really work as for the general trackers mindset, the reason we like trackers rather than cubase is that everything is nice and neatly laid out in a regimented fashion… so…

Here’s an idea… if you had a block insert into a track… like when you make a selection, draw a rectangle around the rows you select (for example select 2 rows, or 4 rows) and only do the zooming within that area… and allow the number of notes within that block be adjustable, so for example you could pick 2 rows (where they represent 8th notes) and say use 3 rows within this block, this would make a triplet. This feature would even be useful to have 16th notes (select 1 row and say put 2 notes here, or select 8 rows and say put 16 notes here) this would enable you to have double precision notes without having to double the length of all the patterns (I know you could use the note retrigger command, to do this but this is just an example).

This way you can keep the regimented layout, and see exactly when blocks start (to sync with other tracks) but the note start time for the notes in the block would be linear interpolated with the total time of the block.

The block could be rendered scaled or as a popup when you get there.

J