I think the delay column is neat because you can have your notes"quantized" on lines, yet alter the feel with the delay column. It gets around the problem of recording a performance that’s not exactly on the beat, yet the display shows you the metrical placement “quantized” while preserving the feel with the delay column. Is there any way to delay a note forward? Like if I have snares on the two and four, can I have the play slightly ahead of the beat, but still keep them on the lines for 2 and 4?
No, there isn’t that I’m aware of. I have wanted this too. Delay column should support minus values 
You can give a track a neg delay in the mixer.
When it was first introduced I did post whether a default of 80 would be more suitable, so you have plus and minus delays possible, but it was never taken on board.
Also a Default Delay has been suggested. Then you could write your whole song with 80 as normal default and give yourself the ability to negative delay on the same line.
Currently it would be a pain to do anything along those lines though!
seriously, people should listen to you more often.
I really can’t see the problem here.
Just give the whole track a negative delay in the mixer.
Why would this not work?
If you change the default to 80 all the songs of previous version have bad timing when the delay colmn is used…
so you mean give the track a negative delay, and then use positive delay-values in the track fx columns to adjust on a per-note basis? yeah, that would work fine i suppose. but its still a workaround, which is why this is suggested.
Because that is only one track. What if you have 10+ drum tracks that may occasionally want an early hit for groove purposes? And you give it a delay then every hit you don’t want to be out you then have to give a positive value in the Delay column, so again loads of extra work!
Haha, cheers mate.
This is also why I’m such a strong advocate of adding a default Delay value, such has been added for the Vol column. Then people could do this themselves by setting it to 80. Would be easy to write a script to convert your songs to this new way of working.
WARNING: Working like this would break almost all other scripts that enter data in any way into the pattern unless provisions were made for it or you were willing and able to edit them yourself to take the fact into account that they assume 0 delay as the median.
My example of anticipating the 2 and the 4 to create a driving groove was simplistic and like too simplistic to set for a whole track. Any other tricks to try?
One thing that needs to be taken into account is that all pattern effects need to be correctly offset as well. That is why this needs to be adressed as a new core feature of renoise, I think?
80 should be the new 00.
This too has been one of my bugbears with Renoise…I’ve tried to compensate by putting the hit on the line above and delaying from there
I will have a look a the track delay later on but having some ‘minus’ values in the column would be extremely cool
Here’s a solution that would allow “negative delays” via Advanced Edit > Vol/Pan/Delay/FX > Modify
The change is not currently implemented. If you like the idea, please comment.
In the short term, you can create negative delays via Advanced Edit > Notes > Nudge Up
–:: ::
–:: ::
–:: ::
C4:: ::
Advanced Edit > Notes > Nudge > 40 > Up
result:
–:: ::
–:: ::
C4:: C0 ← same as
–:: :: ← note here, played 40 ticks before
or manually: (1) Place the note one line above, (2) Set a delay value by hand.
–:: ::
–:: ::
–:: ::
C4:: ::
move note up and set delay (C0 in example)
–:: ::
–:: ::
C4:: C0 ← same as
–:: :: ← note here, played 40 ticks before