I think Renoise should be recompiled in a second version, “Babynoise”, suitable for complete beginners and children. In this version, almost everything would be removed/disabled/not visible. The only thing that would work would be:
This way, “Babynoise” could be spread as freeware to schools. Children would learn tracking more easily. And more people would sooner or later buy the full version.
EDIT: Well, load/save song would be enabled too, of course.
Why not, there used to a kids audio sequencer called something like ‘super doper music looper’
My son who is 2 loves Renoise. Start up a new song for at 300bpm chuck in random some samples and he’s the new Squarepusher.
Yeah, what was I thinking? Too much sun here in Sweden right now, so many random ideas pop up in my head. I blame it on that gorgeous blonde woman who wondered what I was doing on my laptop. She even tried Renoise for a few seconds, but then said she didn’t understand anything. So, if Renoise would been easier (“Babynoise”, or maybe “Babenoise”, haha), I might have had better luck with her. Now she probably thought I was too introverted and nerdy. Damn!
Well I’m certainly not against the idea of getting more young kids into tracking (or hot women for that matter!), I didn’t mean to ridicule your idea or anything, but I’m not sure that a modified version of Renoise is the right solution. Mainly just because, hypothetically speaking, it would be eating into development time that should be spent on the real Renoise… which is bad, mmkay!
For total n00bs to computer music making, there are other more friendly apps that can give a better introducing to the general concepts, figuring out what sounds good, etc. Even loop-based tools can give people a feel for which types of sounds work together, and learning some techniques which could be applied later when they are finally making their own new sounds.
For total n00bs to tracking itself, I don’t think a more basic interface will help very much. It’s simply a case of being patient, paying attention to what you’re doing, following tutorials, and examining the work of others. The user is going to need to know the more advanced techniques in the end anyway, so hiding these features from them at first is just going to make things more confusing later I think. The most valuable thing, in my opinion, is when you have a friend there beside you to guide you through things. Someone who is patient and doesn’t make you more frustrated, who can tell you what you need to know, let you play around and make a few mistakes of your own, then tell you why it didn’t work, etc. That can be the difference between being completely f#@!king lost, and quickly becoming a tracker ninja.
I don’t think it’s hard concept to grasp, I was using fasttracker in the age of 12 , so if you aren’t really aiming at infants I think renoise is cool. What is more important imo is community releasing more xrns so people can actually learn by seeing tunes from inside, i would probably never do music at all if I didn’t have loads of modules to learn from
The problem with this (and why I dont’ release a lot of xrns files) is the issues I have with the internal DSPs. They’re okay and get the job done, but for serious use, I can’t use them and be happy. IF Renoise didn’t allow VST, I would have nothing negative to say, but with the VSTs being available, I use them…and not everyone has every VST out there, so distributing a song that makes use of such technology outside of the program will probably get annoyed at having to download them for a single song to listen to. Distributing the .dll with the song in an archive is out of the question as well since there are commercial VSTs and even free VSTs have limits on distribution (don’t bite the hand that feeds, I say).
Beatbattle and Soundevotion are enough, I think, for checking out other people’s exploits from the source…you see some really suprising things and hear some really awesome music.
