I’m a guitarist first – learned that before learning keys or any electronic instruments/ beat making software/ hardware, etc.
The first thing that made me fall in love with Renoise was that it has the GuttRoll plugin – it lets you enter notes on a guitar neck instead of translating to a piano keyboard or some other representation. So great.
Then I discovered ChordGun, set up some keystrokes that I could enter quickly, and this is now my favorite way of sketching out songs
Alongside those, I’ve just gotten used to the tracker interface for entering notes. If you know (for example) which notes go into a chord, you can very quickly enter them in the tracker by holding down [shift] and entering all the notes in the chord [shift + d3 + g3 + d4 + f#4] = Dmaj7. Pair that with the step length setting so that it automatically advances 4 or 6 lines after you enter the chord and you can get a nice syncopated chord progression going in no time.
With all that said, it sometimes comes in handy to have a piano-style midi controller handy, especially one with a lot of buttons and knobs for automating parameters and triggering events.
I find that giving myself over to the way Renoise wants to work leads me in interesting creative directions. I really like recording a guitar part, chopping it up, and sequencing the chops back into the tracker.