brining life into drums with the samplerfunction of renoise… not to difficult… it even has the roundrobin function you are talking about.
And your in luck. I am having trouble sleeping… so i am going to spend a few minutes to type in a very long boring story about how me personally do it…
So lets begin our journey into living drums with what is round-robin:
With RoundRobin usually is means : Picked from a rotating pool … in this context… roundrobin in samplers they mean "a pool of samples where you can samples are picked from.
So thats a nice start 
You can enable this feature, by adding a kick + snare + hihat in the sampler… and in the keyzone editor choose “create drumkit” … now each sample gets its own keyzone, which has a global option for overlapping samples.
this means: that if you select this option, you can choose between “play all” or “Cycle” or "Random … in the case of living drumsound… you probably want to select random (where some sample is chosen from the overlapping keyzones) …
Now you got 2 options:
either find a multi-sample-snarekit… or create one…
Lets create one:
You start out with 1 LONGSOUNDING SNARE DRUM… with a FAT attack… and a LONG tail…
and you make a few copies… Make sure, that every copies keyzone is overlapping the others…
Now you can individually edit the snare sample… Cut a bit of the front… and a bit of the tail… Now each sample should sound the same… but slightly difrent.
now load an EQ on the trackchannel… change eq a bit, to shape snare sound…
in the sample-editor, there is a button that “renders the vst fx into the sample” … use it…
select other snare…
change eq slightly
render it
etc etc
now all your snares should sound, “the same” but difrent… and if you play with your snare key, it should automagicly choose a difrent variety…
You can do the same with your hihat. and your kick…
Now go to your modulation setup of this sampleset…
create 3 modulation-tracks…
call them kick or hihat or snare…
attach the correct samples to the correct modulation tracks (so all your snares, to your snare modulation, all hihats to hihats modulation. etc etc)
add an ADSR to each VOLUMEmodulation… Set the attack of the kick as fast as possible… but set the attack of the hihat and the snare, slightly slower then kick. and add a very slow moving random lfo to it… with just minimal amplitude… dont forget to select the * sample infront of the random lfo… else your modulation will be weird/non existent…
on the PITCHmodulation track… also add a slow moving random lfo with very small amplitude…
if done correctly… every sample played will be slightly difrent pitched (but almost unhearable) then the others…
The volume/amplitude will differ because of the lfo… the pitch willl differ slightly because of lfo.
a difrent sample is used because of the overlap/roundrobin feature…
Now create a phrase… and dont forget to set “transpose” to “none” … else things get difficult with no sounding drums if you press the wrong key…
sidenote when using beta3.1 you cant use “the sample-column” as this de-activates the keyzone function, thus dissabling half the work you just done"
Enter a nice rythm…
to help you started do kick hihat snare hihat kick hihat… on each even step
now add some “ghost notes” for the snare and the hihat… in between the just entered rythm
give them a lower velocity/volume. and just for the fun of it… in the FXlane put 0Y60
which means “maYbe” play the notes… (so the ghostnotes get played randomly two)
If you play the phrase… you should hear a nice “lively” drumrythm… but you can even “humanize” it…
Select entire phrase and press Ctrl+H … which humanizes your stuff…
And yes, more can be achieved, by using fx…
so go to the fx page… add 3 fx tracks… call them kick snare hihat… and connect the correct samples to the correct fx-track.
kicks love compression… snares love compression… hihats do not (atleast not this stage)
put a bit reverb on the snare… but not enough to “be heard” but just enough to be “there”
Now to make things gel a bit…
Put a signal follower on the kick-fx…
connect it with a gainer on the snare-fx.
adjust the signal follower, that each time the kick triggers, the snare tracks gainer goes down just a few db…
put a signal follower behind the gainer on the snaretrack… and a gainer on the hihatfx-track…
do same thing…
if done correctly, again… it will change the sound a bit while playing… thicker kick gets difrent snaresound then a small kick…
Panning your samples… also helps, to push the realness a bit…
look at pictures of drumkit… snares usually on the left… hihats to… toms from the leftmiddle to the lowerright… ridecymbal on the right… crash on the left…
funny enough… audiences are facing you… so they hear this in reverse for them the snare is on the right, if i am not mistaken…
and yes, if you have multiple snares "you can pan them slightly appart)
for example if snare1 is left34 . snare2 can be left 30 or something in between
Combine all this, with lots of tinkering…
and on the main-channel mixer… you can add all the stuff you normally would put on your drums
like a compressor, or reverb you really hear… little bit of distortion… whatever floats your boat…
and well…
thats how me personally would do “living drums” within renoise… without a drummachine-vst or a sampler-vst or a hardware drummachine…
enjoy
