Another Drumkit Question

hi guys

firstly thanks in advance to those who answer all the questions in this forum, it’s a big help.

my problem is with pitch shifting drum hits in the pattern editor using the alt+F1/F2 method. Instead of changing the pitch of that particular sample, say, a snare, it changes sample to the next note in the drumkit. so instead of having my pitch shifted snare i have a kick drum or hi hat etc. screws up the whole beat. the work around i have is load each drum hit as it’s own instrument and switch to those when i want to pitch shift my drums but it is a pain. is there something i need to do to when generating the drum kit to get this to work?

using 2.5 btw, yeah i should dl the new one

thanks

If you want to permanently change the pitch of the snare in the kit (ie. every snare note in your song will be affected) then you should change its Transpose value in the Sample Properties.

If you want to play the snare at different pitches in your song then you have a couple of options. The first option is to do what you’ve done already: move the snare to its own unique instrument where you can do whatever the hell you want with it. The other option is to use the Sample Keyzones editor to map the same snare sample to multiple different notes, and then give each keyzone a different basenote so that the snare has a different pitch.

Edit…

Ah, then your only real option in 2.5 is to move the snare to a unique instrument.

If you have access to 2.7 then you should just use 2.7 and enjoy the new flexible keyzones :)

Hmm, I’m not sure I have an answer for you. But I’ve got a question, why are you pitching drums? What does that do for you?

When pitching samples I use the the pitch shifter tool on the samples. It’s fine if you already know basically what pitch you want.

ok so im guessing that puts the same samples on different octaves and i would be able to use the altF1 method to pitch shift as that transposes the notes up or down?

are you talking about the pitch shifter in the instrument editor? i don’t want to alter the pitch of the sample, just the notes at which it’s played in the pattern editor. and i do this simply to get interesting break beat patterns to answer your question.

to be honest the fact that renoise didn’t have this feature readily available is the reason why i still have to use fl studio.

btw dblue thankyou for your timestretch vst it is very very handy.

There’s also the nifty Timestretch tool that you might be able to use:

http://tools.renoise.com/tools/rubberband-timestretchpitch-shift

Check it out?

hi again, old question i asked a while ago here. just wondering if anything like this has been implemented yet for 3.0? did a quick search of the forums and couldn’t find anything, apologies in advance if this has already been asked.

just to clarify: i’m looking for a way to pitch shift slices from the drum kit in the pattern editor (not to pitch shift slices in the sample editor.)

thanks

Is this what you mean?

In that case, it has become really easy to adjust the overall pitch of the instrument:
Use the global “transpose” option (located in the instrument editor’s topmost toolbar) and all samples will be transposed without causing any changes to samples, keymaps or internal fx…

If you want to change the pitch of individual samples, sample properties → transpose would still be the way to go.

i think i didn’t explain myself properly in my original post. i want to be able to pitch shift notes in the pattern editor, without effecting the pitch of the instrument in the instrument or sample editor as that permanently alters the pitch for that slice. Transposing a note in an instrument that is a drum kit selects the next slice in that kit, it does not playback that slice at a lower or higher pitch.

Then you would frankly need an instant slide command, which could be achieved by setting the Ticks per line to 1 in the playback and compatibility settings (song menu) and then setting the pitch command to the value where the target note is instantly reached, but this also affects all your other sample commands (like retrigger no longer working).

thanks for that tip. but i really don’t get it how this is such a complicated thing to do. renoise has so many great features i don’t get why this isn’t one of them. surely i’m not the only one who does their drums and other samples like this. I’m not a huge fan of FL but in there you can load a break into the slicer, chop it, then mess with the pitch in the piano roll without effecting the sample in the slicer. that’s all i’m looking for. is there something within the programming of renoise that prevents this or something?

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Sorry, i was a bit sleeping when i was giving that advise.
There is ofcourse even a less complicated way to transpose by simply mapping each drum to more keys in the keyzone.
But you would need to destrucively render the slices for that in the sample editor contextmenu (Slices → Destructively Render slices), else you cannot expand the assigned keyzones

Strange it is not documented, as it is a native feature…

I more and more think that the intended way to handle drums in Renoise is to have one instrument per drum and not one for the whole drumkit. The most recent addition of binding an instrument to a single track is highly indicative that taktik thinks of drums in that rather unusual way. The fact that in this way a drumkit is not actually playable doesn’t seem to bother the developers to much it seems. Anyway, it consequently seems that you are supposed to put each of the slices in it’s own instrument. You can then achieve what you want. The fact that splitting a sample into slices by default keeps them in one instrument though suggests again that using the sampler for drums has not been fully considered during development.

The best solution (and perhaps not too hard to implement) for expansion of the slice player could be that the slices are not mapped to keys by default (you can optionally link them to keyzones), but you would have to resort to the sample offset-command to trigger a specific slice at the triggered pitch.

the other way around would be to allow to call phrases using an effect command, we could then program 120 phrases of one line, where each phrase has a different offset and plays the note in the alternative pitch.
This however means the phrases would have to be mapped differently and not by default to keys.

The drumkit is just a basic drumkit feature that you at least could expect from every sampler and every basic midi keyboard has. It gives you a default setting from which you can play with after you applied it. It is not a breakbeat alteration feature but a thing that allows you to quickly divide several drumsamples across your note-midi keyboard range.
The slicer was done to allow sample-precise cutting up of breakbeats without having to resort to the sample offset command at which you could get sort of in the neighbourhood if your sample wasn’t too large in filesize since the sample ofset command divided each offset to 1/256th of the filesize.

This drumkit is very playable for the purpose that it was designed for. That it doesn’t serve the functionality that you had in mind means you need to consider a different path to achieve what you want.

Yes, if you want to pitch up one percussion sample all the way up and down, then the only way is to give each sample its own instrument and perhaps assign the midi controller to all the instruments and let each instrument listen to its own channel.
If you can do it with 12 notes (using F-x as basenote so that you can go up or down) then you could cram 10 samples into one instrument.

You completely missed my point here I’m afraid. I was not talking of the functionality of this ilnomed button labeled create drumkit. I don’t care for this button. I was just pointing out that the usage of drums - think of proper drums, not chopped up break beats - is something Renoise in general handles very badly or at least inconsistently. The sampler - as you also just mentioned - does not provide any special support for drumkits. This, however is badly needed. Please see also my other thread I created today which addresses this in particular.

Yes i read it a bit later than this thread.
I was keeping my answer within the scope of this topic frankly, the breakbeat chopping expansion would be a minor addition to the idea you already posed but i suspect do need less of a structural change in the instrument design.

I have a personal idea of how drumkits can be created with the current options, including using the mute groups that definitely filled in a nasty gap.
This includes the usage of phrases and the maYbe command to get round robin done on sample variation levels.

Fair enough.

Cool! Could you elaborate on this? I am curious. Or even post an example?
The round robin functionality is actually fine for me as it is. The problem for me is rather that I have no good overview of which samples are variations of one drum hit, because there are no mute groups etc. Neither can I affect all of these variations in one go (e.g. change all their volumes, panning etc. with respect to other drums). But that belongs to the other thread :slight_smile:

Concerning the question of the OP: A solution might be a script that splits all slices into its own new instrument. Those can then be transposed easily.

I was kind of disappointed about the Drumkit way of doing things in ReNoise 3 , i was looking for a replacement for Hydrogen , mainly because Hydrogen does not do round robin , but Hydrogen does very well with routing and I use Ardour so these two were a good fit , I may still purchase ReNoise 3 for something different , but I was really hoping for something a little more for doing Acoustic kit sampling . I think thats where @fladd was getting at about Drumkit in ReNoise .

Indeed :slight_smile:

If you have a snare set from the same snare but with different timbre’s each timbre having its own range of velocity levels i could try to make the example.
Basically it comes down to grouping timbres under different keys (let’s just pick several left drumstick samples in a group and several right drumstick samples in another group) and then creating a phrase to randomly pick a sample from any of the timbres using the velocity layer that was called from the main pattern editor. The MaYbe command takes care for the “random” factor… (It is still not totally random as it is seed based, but you have at least a bit more for a natural drumhit)

This one did that:
http://www.renoise.com/node/634
But one of the Devs asked me to stop maintaining it after a native solution was build in 2.8. (The 2.8 version was ready btw)
Ofcourse, i am not telling anybody else to not download and patch the 2.7 version to 3.0. ;)

this actually works perfect for what i wanted to do. the sample commands this affects, could a work around be something like setting the lpb quite high as there would only be 1 tick per line?
thanks again