I’m embarrassed to say that after years of trying to find the “right” pattern length to balance short loop programming vs. sequencing longer musical phrases, I’m just now beginning to appreciate the role of block loop in the renoise workflow.
One thing I find annoying is that there aren’t mappable shortcuts to change the loop length so I have to mouse around for it. I suspect this is one of those things a few lines of lua scripting can resolve though.
How do you guys incorporate block loop functionality into your workflows?
Really, nobody uses this? I think it’s really useful to construct loops on different time scales so one doesn’t end up with that kind of pattern-length-legos song structure. Seems like block loop is perfect for working with smaller time scales. It’s kind of inefficient to loop at the pattern scale when you’re working on a smaller unit.
I vaguely remember a tutorial by esa ruoho a while back where he would start tracks with a very short pattern and expand out from there. Seems like block loop would be a better solution… if I could get around the lack of keyboard controls and if its functionality could be expanded a bit (e.g. shifting forwards and backwards by the block size).
Holy crap, this little macro just leveled up my live beat construction workflow. Rip through 1-2 beat takes over and over until the timing’s right, unroll the block, repeat, all without stopping. So fluid…
PS, that’s already in Renoise. I think the defaults are on Ctrl+NumPadPlus and Ctrl+NumPadMinus but I could be wrong as I mess with the shortcut prefs a lot. You can find them in the prefs under keys, then Global>Transport>Select Previous/Next LoopBlock