There’s been a lot of hype on the internets lately about Life by XLN Audio: 1 (part I’m talking about starts around 11’20"), 2 (skip to 2’20"), 3 (skip to 0’52"), 4 (skip to 3’57")
The really interesting part of this plugin for me is how quickly and easily you can use it to get very musical results from pretty much any random sample.
Renoise can obviously slice up samples as quickly and easily as Life can, and it can even randomize those slices very easily, and add various effects to them. But is it as easy to get very musical-sounding results from those slices in Renoise without a lot of painstaking effort or at least trial-and-error? If so, I’d really like to see a tutorial on how to do that.
Sorry if this comes off sounding as a stupid question. I’ve been away from Renoise and music making for a long time, and am just getting back in to both, and this Life plugin has really impressed me, and I’m just hoping Renoise can already do something like that.
As long as renoise does not feature some sort of waveform / frequency response detection, there is no way you could get away without a lot of human trial and error to obtain similar results.
XLN Life presumably uses the detection code of XO (similar to other sample managers like Atlas & Sononym) and takes it a step further to put the source material’s partials into a musical pattern based on what the detection algorithm most closely identified as usable partial for “kickdrum”, “hihat”, “snare”, etc. from the source sample.
The rest is just note / midi data to trigger those elements in a way it is most commonly used, e.g. “kickdrum”-ish sound goes on every onbeat, “snare”-ish sound on every 2nd onbeat, etc.
it seems it also applies normalization and some sort of amp envelope on the individual partials to further polish the obtained result and make it sound even more coherent.
renoise’s sampler is merely able to detect transients and automatically set markers based on a set threshold to where it “thinks” a new sample trigger takes place, however there is no way to teach renoise which new transient represents what kind of percussive sample.
so i guess you still got to put some man-made labour into your sample slicing missions if renoise shall remain your sole weapon.