To an extend I know what you are saying, but feel you exaggerate a tad to much here . I think it is a matter of what workflow you’re currently accustomed to. I’ve worked with Buzz, buze & fl studio and love the way you can sequence patterns in their respective editors, though couldn’t really finish one track in there…all a matter of dedication and time to get a good work flow.
People have been tracking the oldskool ‘renoise’ way since forever with good results to show for, so it is not THAT dramatic way of sequencing
Well, say that you have a drum track in pattern 12, which you want to copy and put in patterns 16, 20 and 24. In Buzz it takes literally three seconds to do this, and you can see exactly what is where.
How do you do this in Renoise, quickly? And how do you see that you’ve done it correctly, without playing all of those patterns? What if the only difference between this drum pattern and the normal drum pattern is at the end of the pattern, and perhaps off the bottom of the pattern screen, so you would have to scroll down to see if it was the correct drum track in each pattern?
Sure people have been managing without a Sequence Editor since before the days of Buzz, but the operative word is “managing”. Adding a Sequence Editor should be easy compared to the huge number of updates that Renoise has had over the years, and those who don’t want to use it, wouldn’t have to anyway, so we’d all be happy!
I still don’t understand how you can visualise what your song is like if you only have a pattern sequencer.
Look at:
Then compare this to a single, static screenshot of a song in Buzz, in the Sequence Editor.
Taking the pattern sequencer to its logical conclusion, you may as well just have one row, which is either
0
or
1
Obviously that’s stupid, but going the other way, and adding more columns to the pattern sequencer, so it becomes a sequence editor, is the next logical step, and Buzz has already shown us that it works.
Anyway, I just can’t use Renoise until this is done, or something very similar.
I go to pattern 12, highlight the drum-track I want & press shift+f4, use the mouse to scroll to pattern 16 and press shift+f5, same for pattern 20 & 24. Ten seconds maximum and than I’m being slow, not really something to get worked up over + they are ‘unique’ copies, so you can change the copied input without changing the original or worry that you’ll change the successive copies.
But I don’t really work or think that way when I’m tracking. Often I jam a beat / loop a pattern that inspires me, clone that for a couple of patterns…add, tweak and/or subtract stuff and let the stream of music decide where to go next. Often I like having lots of variation, so repeating stuff is not really attractive for me as a composition strategy in the first place. If I want copies of portions somewhere else I just copy it to the desired destination, really simple actually. Also having some kind of text description when actually constructing a song helps as pointers to what is going on if that is an issue.
Maybe this is a buzz specific thing, but what do you mean with ‘normal’ drum-track? What is the problem here? How would you not know you’ve copied it correctly? You’ve selected the drumtrack in pattern 12 and pasted it in the destination pattern (16, 20 & 24)!
You know what you’re copying right? Maybe thats the difference here in sequencing, that in Renoise you have to be more aware of what you are doing. But again, this is a personal workflow issue, the way I’m used to track I feel totally comfortable juggling around in a linear fashion and still be able to know what is going on where. And yes, sometimes you have to listen back to what you are creating! I’d do the same when sequencing in a buzz or fl studio playlist type sequencer.
Think of events happening on a vertical timeline and use your imagination. Also, don’t get to much hung up on the visual aspects of sequencers. The limit is not always the sequencer guru levitates.
Don’t get me wrong, I hope renoise will incorporate the buzz style sequencer / fl studio’s playlist editor feature soon (been advocating this for years as I definitely see great potential for it). Especially for a better (zoomable) oversight to see what is going on where, but feel like I have to counter some of your expressed criticism like it is a slower, somewhat difficult way of working.
Also, I don’t get the last part of your post… you can already add more columns to a pattern in Renoise by pressing ctrl+t . Or did you mean something else?
so instead of “at position 5, play pattern 05” it would be “at position 5, play tracks 05 04 01 02”
plus: when you horizontally collapse it, renoise could just display “fake” pattern numbers, so every unique combination of tracks has its unique number… so people who don’t want to use it would never even have to know it’s there.
this is indeed something i’ve been thinking about! making the arranger even more modular would be total sex for me!
i think it would speed up the process of sketching tracks and it would make the arrangement much more readable. would probably make renoise even better for a live setting but i wouldn’t know about that.
best of all… say you have a bass line and you experiment with a drum track. as it is now you do a new pattern for each (or atleast i do ) variation. with parallel patterns you get a clean pattern which could also be neatly called for example “shuffle feel”.
the annoying thing as it is now IMO!1 is that if you have all those variations and then you figure out that “hey! changing the bassline like this would be total sex!” with this modification to the bassline then you have to change all the pattern variations which can be quite a bit of boring copy paste work.
as a programmer i <3 reusable code… this isn’t all that much different!
//mäs
edit: wouldn’t it be quite a good idea to have the ability to stack the arranger with parallel patterns on top of the pattern view? maybe a seperate arranger view also.
edit again:
yes, polymeters would be a piece of cake to play around with. just putting a repeating pattern of 3 bars against a repeating pattern of 5 bars and play with it would be some seriously good times! \ /
“track sequencer” seems a bit much hassle to use, because in a classic scenarion we would need to fill rows of
01 01 01 01 …
02 02 02 02 …
and so on…
But a “pattern sequencer on this model” would be nice to see! With the ability to play more than one pattern at once, in parallel. It would be tracker style, fast and powerful ! Here is my proposal :
Such pattern sequencing could be done in an entire panel/view that would be dedicated (Arranger sounds an original name )
The panel should provide multiple pattern columns that would be the macro equivalent of note columns in a track.
Plus multiple ‘global’ FX columns that would :
— allow controlling master bus effects
— (if used) override any pattern speed/tempo-related effect
We will need a way to configure time units in this view, I think of some sort of “Beats Per Pattern” setting in analogy to LPB (that would be automatable via FX commands)…
nope. that’s why I said you could make it totally transparent (read the last bit of what you quoted again please). eg. when you clone a pattern, renoise clones all tracks in it. if you copy a pattern, renoise copies the tracks. and so on.
Sorry Johann, I didnt’ notice this! And it seems really satisfying indeed
Empty cells could be used for repeating the same pattern track once finished and note offs to stop it…
With such track sequencing + master FX tracks it would be killer!
Have you used Buzz?
Ten seconds for that operation - in Buzz it’s one second. And I do it all the time while writing a piece of music. I’ll suddenly think “I want to put drum pattern 04 there, instead of drum pattern 00” and I can do it in one second. Then, while the track is playing, maybe looping just that section of the song, I type ‘4’ and I can hear drum pattern 04 again. How do you do this in Renoise? Presumably you have to go through that hellish rigmarole that you described above. Ten seconds! Even five seconds is WAY longer than it takes in Buzz. I can just type 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. to go through all the drum patterns I want to hear, at that particular point in the song. Ditto for any other patterns I have created.
Seriously, I don’t know how anybody can stand doing it the ‘old’ way. (I’m presuming that all trackers apart from Buzz and Buzz clones do it the Renoise way, correct me if I’m wrong.)
But most people DO write that way. Most people are going to write a drum pattern, for example, then clone it to pattern 01 and adjust parts, then make a new clone, pattern 02, and adjust some parts of that, and then want to throw them down onto the song like:
00
00
00
01
00
00
00
02
03
03
03
03
etc.
This must be hellish using Renoise (or any other tracker apart from Buzz). I can set this up in a few seconds, then change it to my heart’s content, just by typing one key at whatever position I want to change.
Nowhere near as simple as Buzz. Plus you can’t SEE where you have copied them.
How would you represent, in your mind, a song with, say, 120 patterns, like the ones above, with different drum parts in each pattern? There is literally no way to SEE this information, in a macro view, nor any other pattern data. In other words, without the Buzz Sequence Editor, you have no way to ‘zoom out’ and view the entire song.
Just having the current pattern sequencer in Renoise is nigh on useless.
Yes, but the point is that one piece of text cannot represent this:
etc.etc.
How do you represent:
Drums04 Synth1Start SynthPadsVerse LeadBridge
etc.etc.? with one word? What if you change it to
Drums03 Synth1Start SynthPadsVerse LeadBridge
How do you write that down with one word, in the pattern sequencer?
Yes, I know what I’m copying - but how do I remember where I’ve put everything? If I have 120 patterns in my song, and I want to change the drum patterns at 16, 20 and 24, how can I SEE where I’ve put them? I might have changed umpteen other parts of the song in the meantime. So in order to SEE where I have put those drum patterns, I have to view the entire patterns. In Buzz, I can see it all instantly, in the Sequence Editor. What if I want to change those three drum patterns, in 16, 20 and 24, to Drum Pattern 05, for example? How long would that take in Renoise? What if I have, for example, 32 instances of Drum Pattern 02 (I realise this doesn’t apply to Renoise, but just imagine it’s the 3rd variation of the drum pattern) and they are all over the Renoise patterns, spread out between the first and last patterns. What if I want to change any part of that pattern? In Buzz, I just go into DrumPattern02 by pressing Enter in the Sequence Editor, then change the pattern, and then ALL instances of it are changed within the song.
In Renoise - what do I do? I’ll tell you - I have to manually edit one of the drum patterns, (which is the same as in Buzz), then I have to manually paste it into EVERY instance it occurrs in the song! 32 times! That’s gotta suck…
It’s like the difference between HTML, and HTML with CSS. Change the style in the ONE CSS file, and it changes all instances of that style throughout your website.
Which is obviously a negative, not a positive. Obviously Buzz users are well aware of what they are doing.
Yes, you have to listen back to your song because there is no visual representation of the whole song in Renoise. Which sucks.
This in no way helps me. It is simple: Renoise needs a Sequence Editor like Buzz has. Until then, you are unnecessarily making life very difficult for yourself.
Obviously it’s MUCH slower to do it the Renoise way.
In Buzz, you are using the Sequence Editor to refer to patterns.
In Renoise, you have to edit EVERY instance of a given track within each pattern that it occurs. This can be incredibly time consuming, and the whole ‘feel’ of the song is lost because you are unnecessarily having to work around the program, rather than having the program help you as much as possible.
If I were to start writing a song in Renoise today, I would immediately (I mean as soon as I finished the first pattern) start thinking to myself - why do I have to manually copy and paste data which I have already entered? Why isn’t the program helping me to put this data into the next pattern as much as possible?
Buzz is perfect in this regard.
I said pattern sequencer, not pattern. You can only represent an entire pattern, which could have 32 tracks (!!!) with one number of piece of text. That is just useless to me. It really kills creativity.
I can see the entire song in Buzz, in the Sequence Editor. I know what all the following represents, because it’s broken into pattern sized chunks for each track:
(Obviously this looks much neater in Buzz!)
In Renoise you are stuck with:
Start
Verse
Chorus1
Chorus2
etc.
So how do I take the LeadHits pattern at the end of my Buzz example, and try it out in the second and fourth patterns in Renoise? In Buzz it will take me literally two seconds to go ‘cursor up’ a few times (presuming I’m not already there), and then ‘4’, cursor down, cursor down, ‘4’ (presuming ‘LeadHits’ is represented by number 4 on the keyboard).
You simply can’t experiment like that in any other tracker apart from Buzz, without it taking a huge amount of time. The whole ‘picture’ of the song just doesn’t exist in Renoise. In Buzz I can see it at all stages, both macro and micro.
And this is without even getting into effect patterns…
Sorry for the blurred image, the forum software does that for some reason…
Okay - in the right hand track, I have four tracks, ‘Synth1 Fill’, two of 00, and two of 01. All four instances are one quarter the length of the other tracks.
So let’s say I want to edit this and make it as follows:
That took me literally five to ten seconds to do. (Obviously I didn’t write anything into the actual patterns themselves in that time, but say I had already written them and wanted to experiment with them in different places.)
Now, let’s say I want to do the following:
How would you possibly do this in Renoise? And remember where everything was? There is literally no way to see this information, without manually viewing every single pattern, which still never gives you a global view of the entire song.
And also in Buzz, you can do the following:
If I like the start of pattern 02 and want to use it part way through pattern 03 (this would apply more to drum patterns, of course), I can do it, as shown above. All of this would be a nightmare to even attempt in Renoise. How would you do it? How long would it take?
I have doubled the step size, so that the patterns take up half the vertical space.
My cursor is at the 96th beat. I have pressed CTRL+E to set the end of the loop. You can see the dotted horizontal line above the cursor.
How do you set these loop parameters in Renoise?
I totally agree. The Buzz Sequence Editor represents reusable code. Try it!
This already exists perfectly in Buzz - see my post above.
…is there morning snot covering your eyes? We’ve already established a pattern arranger is the way to go for Renoise in the future. You don’t have to convince me, or are you trying to convert me (or others here) to Buzz in the meantime?
You are obviously missing the point of my reply, maybe because of blind fanboy-ism? Which reads like a kvr, ‘my DAW is better thread’. ZZzz
There were dudes in the 50’s of the last century making master pieces with only tape-machines. It is not the tools that matter, but what you do with them!
The point of your reply was, I quote, that you felt like you “have to counter some of your expressed criticism like it is a slower, somewhat difficult way of working.”
which was BS to begin with, because it actually IS a shitty way of working compared to the better one. And hey, I love Renoise, I love working in it, I don’t feel hindered at all - but that doesn’t mean anything, we never realize what we’re missing out on until we had it at least once.
So he tried again, reeeeally slow this time. If you lack the imagination even when pics are posted, just go and try Buzz please. I don’t like it at all, never used it beyond one test song, but that one feature pwns so much! And it’s really, really old. He didn’t talk about anything else. So who’s being a petty fanboy here, posting awkward workarounds that aren’t even workarounds, not even shadows of what could be accomplished by a proper track arranger? Which btw I think this is a 0.1 feature every tracker has been screaming for ever since Buzz did it. There’s always time to improve the GUI for it, but how it has to work internally is pretty much obvious.
Beh. You say “oh why are you posting this, I already know it”, and then end your post with this? That’s a joke.
. I think it is a matter of what workflow you’re currently accustomed to. I’ve worked with Buzz, buze & fl studio and love the way you can sequence patterns in their respective editors, though couldn’t really finish one track in there…all a matter of dedication and time to get a good work flow.
I’d do the same when sequencing in a buzz or fl studio playlist type sequencer.
) variation. with parallel patterns you get a clean pattern which could also be neatly called for example “shuffle feel”.
/