I have been toying around with the 2.5 version of Renoise, the demo for on and off for a week or so. I am liking it so far. Previous to this I have been using an MPC1000 and misc software like Cubase LE(very buggy) and Reaper. I work with a lot of loops especially drums. I am a guitarist by nature so thinking like a drummer is a little difficult at times for me.
What I want to do is mimic my workflow on the MPC and also implement some of the features of Renoise. And have a one stop operation. Can Renoise do this? Below is my current process.
For me a general song construction idea works like this. (this is very condensed)
1)assign a drum loop to a pad on the MPC.
2)set tempo and length.
3)record guitar track into MPC.
4)overdub and sweeten
5)bring takes and drums into software to mix
I am getting a nice laptop soon so I am preparing what I need, which may be Renoise.
Personally, I prefer dealing with loops with Ableton Live… that’s why I now make my loops/songs in Renoise and when I need to deal with loops for live performances, I render them and use them in Live.
However, for drums, I’d rather use Renoise than any other software any day.
Renoise is WAAAAY faster and lots of features needed for cool drum programming at right at your finger tip, Renoise is my drum machine on steroids!
To give you an idea of Renoise is for you, I’ll try to tell you how I’d do each of your 5 tasks:
Saying the word pad makes me want to link my little sequencer too using the Launch Pad with Renoise… Renoise Based Audio-video Step Sequencer That could be a way to do something similar to what you want to do, except that I’d rather use a 256 monome to use this kind of sequencer… now for the MPC you want to press a button and bang it plays this loop. Yes you can do this. You can map the controller pad midi message to the play button next to each pattern that will let you cue this pattern for it to play once the previous one is playing… that’s sweet. Some guy does this with his livid controller: http://hitoritori.tumblr.com/tagged/Renoise_techniques
You can map this to a knob, yeah… There’s not tap tempo yet but I bet that feature is coming in next version.
For real time, I’d use Ableton Live, otherwise, Renoise does it just fine.
What? I don’t understand.
Yeah Renoise easily does that?
Renoise is definitely handy, but I think you might want to take a look at Ableton Live… I like to use both in my workflow.
Regarding my item 4): Once I lay down a guitar track or whatever. I will overdub multiple guitar tracks, noises, melodies, etc. That’s all. Pretty standard fare. With the MPC(+JJOS) I do like how it handles “takes” and doesn’t delete anything unless I tell it. I guess kinda like a virtual track in some software. This whole idea is a big part of how I work. A live loop recording kinda thing if that makes sense. Like a looper pedal I guess.
Unfortunately Ableton Live is a bit out of my price range at the moment. Maybe the intro version then? Might be a good combo as you suggest.
[edit] When I say live looping I don’t mean performing live in front of people, but rather a personal jam session where I am trying out ideas real time.
