Tonight is my 7th night with Renoise.
I decided to try out the filters and envelopes tonight, but after about an hour of poking through the manual and forums, and knocking my head against the wall, I’m getting nowhere.
How do you automate the cutoff frequency of the instrument filters?
I have to believe there’s some way to do this, but I can’t figure it out.
I must be stupid or something…
Automating filters, eq, distortion, and ringmod in the Instrument Editor is currently not possible.
Have you tried automating the native filter effect instead ?
Just to check, you do mean the Renoise Instrument internal Filters/Envelopes? Not using a VSTi or similar and want to control those built into them.
He probably did. Having a history using Madtracker (where that always was possible).
Mr Mindplay, this feature is on the very big to-do list. So eventually it will be there.
For now you can do this monophonically using some devices and a track filter.
You can trigger a custom LFO oneshot envelope using a Velocity/key device. And then automate the LFO offset parameter.
Yeah I noticed this too. Ik wanted to automate the sustain button, but ended up copying the whole instrument. Now I have 2 of the same samples saved in the songfile…
A whole .xrni rewrite is on the todo list and not sure how likely we are to see many changes within the current system before we get something totally pimped and awesome. I await with baited breath but I wouldn’t dare attempt to hold it…
Also, does anybody else find it weird this is his 7th night with Renoise yet he registered in 2003. Shouldn’t that be 8th year? 
i don’t like what’s going on here… suspicious behaviour… makes me want to wear my tinfoil hat again.
haha, yeah, put on your tinfoil hats, I’m an alien! 
seriously though, I’m actually quite human - I just took a little 8-year break from tracking, and from making music in general. I started again about a week ago, and it’s really the first time (ever) I’m working in-depth with Renoise.
I used to chat with Taktik about Renoise a lot, many years ago - the “mp” in “mpReverb” is actually short for mindplay. That’s me.
I sort of turned slowly from making music to making music software, I was involved in the making of Orion for a few years (if you’ve heard of that) and then eventually I lost interest and dropped the whole thing.
Pysj, you may not remember me, but I remember you - we used to chat on #trax. You haven’t seen me on IRC in probably 10+ years though.
Anyway, with introductions out of the way, and back on topic - I guess I figured something relatively simple like automating filter parameters would be possible by now, 8 years later. It seems like a pretty essential feature. But I’m sure the list of “essential” features is endless, too.
Guess I’ll look to VSTs then. Although I had actually set out to avoid VST altogether, due to the control limitations - having no real ability to program node slides etc., I had my mind set on using samples/instruments exclusively. So much for that idea 
I believe any features relating to altering the behaviour of the instrument parametres has to wait the xrni structure update or whatever. But I do fully agree that the whole instrument system should be almost completely revised, it’s so hopelessly outdated. I’d love to see actual ASDR controls by the envelopes, instrument/sample specific EQ controls, maybe even a simple internal integrated softsynth so that the instruments would be bound to using just samples, and of course everything automatable. Of course that’s just my own distant dream but I’ll keep hoping 
, maybe someday…
Of course I remember you mindplay from the madtracker days. And the mpreverb is still going strong 
The instrument restructuring has been planned for a long time. It do have some sort of priority, because it’s one of the few ancient things left in renoise, so I can guarantee there will not be another 8 years before something happens with it 
. But it is impossible to know exactly when this will be. There are just so many great things on that list…
Anyway, check out the track DSP ninja stuff mentioned earlier!
Yeah, I know about the filter effects - but they’re effects, so not really what I was looking for.
I’ll be looking forward to that update - sounds promising. I think I’ll be sticking with plain samples and effects for now - I’ve heard that VSTs have gotten more stable in the past 8 years while I’ve been away, but I still have an aversion to them. The lack of stability was devastating to my productivity.
Plus they don’t give me what I really want out of a tracker, which is control. I’ve been told it would actually be possible to implement slide and pitch bend effects for modern VSTs now? but it doesn’t look like Renoise has support for that. (yet?) … come to think of it, if I had the choice, I would probably prioritize that over the built-in instrument features, since that’s the main reason those would be necessary/useful in the first place. For me anyway.
Man, it’s tempting to volunteer myself to program all sorts of crazy shit for Renoise myself - network tracking and the missing instrument features for starters. But I’ve promised myself I won’t - I gotta try to actually make music. I program for a living - I need my spare time to consist of something slightly different…
Glad to hear you haven’t forgotten me
wow. so instead of alien, we’re talking celebrity here. pretty cool. i have to say, the mpReverb is so nice, i think the ‘normal’ Reverb could be dropped in favour of something useful, like a multitap-delay. i never use the other Reverb. we should refer to it as ‘the other reverb’ from now on
Things have gotten a lot better, believe me. There’s a lot of excellent stuff out there now, and even a huge amount of freebies that rival the quality of commercial products. An excellent place to start is Togu Audio Line - this guy makes really superb quality instruments and effects.
Since pitch bend is a MIDI feature, you can perform this (and several other useful functions) quite easily by linking a MIDI-Control Device to the VST instrument in question, assuming that the VST itself actually responds to pitch bend in the first place. See the manual for more info: MIDI-Control Device
As for slide, you can usually make a VST instrument perform legato in Renoise by placing your notes in multiple note columns, and structuring them so that the first note’s note-off is triggered after the second note begins, like so:
00 C-401 -----
01 ----- D#401
02 OFF-- -----
03 ----- OFF--
Or to slide from C-4 to D#4 and then back down to C-4:
00 C-401 -----
01 ----- D#401
02 ----- -----
03 ----- OFF--
04 OFF-- -----
How the VST actually interprets this information is a different matter altogether. Some will perform a slide (depending on the settings you choose in the plugin itself, of course), and some will simply ignore it. Beyond that it’s pretty much out of Renoise’s control.
Yeah, I see how that would work - that’s basically how it works in piano roll sequencers, overlapping the notes with a monophonic instrument.
That’s not what I’ve heard though, that it’s out of the sequencer’s control - supposedly there are commands to set the pitch bend range, and if so, when supported by the plugin, that should enable the sequencer to calculate pitch bends as node slides and send them.
I’m not at all up to date on VST tech, but that’s what I’ve been told…
There’s nothing that I’m aware of that is natively available in VST - at least not the VST 2.4 SDK that I’m using.
For example, VST doesn’t offer any native functions for note on, note off, pitch bend, mod wheel, CC, etc. There is simply a “MidiEvents” list that gets filled with data at the beginning of each new processing block, and then it’s the responsibility of the plugin developer to interpret that MIDI data, extract the values that are useful and respond to them accordingly.
There’s definitely a “pitch bend range” RPN available in the General MIDI spec, but setting these RPN values is much more involved as you can see from the page. Renoise obviously does not yet support RPNs directly, but I believe it is possible to construct the RPN manually by painstakingly sending all 6 CC messages in the correct order.
Nevertheless, even if Renoise did make an attempt to send such messages to the VST plugin, it still falls on the responsibility of the plugin developer to actually do something useful with that information, as you already know. I’m sure many of the bigger commercial synth plugins will have moderately good support for the GM spec, but for everything else it will probably be very sporadic. This is definitely not an argument for not trying to implement this stuff, but simply a reminder that it will never be perfect.
Not to mention the fact that every developer has his own way of thinking, and so the actual value ranges may differ greatly from plugin to plugin. One synth may offer a maximum pitch bend range of +/- 1 octave, while another offers +/- 2 octaves, and another still offers +/- 3 octaves, etc. I’m not sure if there’s a completely reliable standardised way for Renoise to actually extract this information from the plugin and then adjust its own behaviour accordingly, or to guarantee that any information it can obtain will actually be accurate.
Edit: The more resources I read it looks like +/- 12 semitones is typically defined as the maximum possible pitch bend range, so hopefully most plugins actually respect this! (I feel like I’ve seen some plugins that offered much larger ranges though?)
Is this supported in the latest release?
nope, though through pattern commands it is possible to trigger different parts of the instruments envelopes, so maybe you can fake it somewhat? Haven’t tried it yet thouhh.
I don’t know if this is relevant thread anymore, but here’s how I did it (see attachment).
Draw (linear whatever) cutoff within envelope editor.
Use E command on track to change position.
Unfortunately it’s not a polyphonic effect like the ones inside instruments, it would only sound right with a monophonic source…
Strike that, I wasn’t reading closely enough. You may strip my guru status now 
are you the same ol´ Mindplay from the old Ft2 days that made SamplerDump and such awesome tracks?!?!??!?!