Entering Notes Manually?

I’ve been playing around with Renoise and thought I’d been making alright progress, but I’m having a tough time finding the answer to the most basic of basic questions. Actually, I guess it falls into two related parts:

  • Is there a way for me to enter note pitch/octave manually? That is, if I want a note to be played at C-2, is there a way I can just type in “C-2”? If there’s a way to manually edit the pitch/octave field, I haven’t found it.
  • Using the standard keyboard input, is it possible for me to play a note lower than C-4? From my computer’s keyboard? From what I can tell the answer is no, but that seems odd to me.

These are probably stupid, but I’ve been through the manual and these forums pretty thoroughly, and haven’t found the answer (and obviously the Wiki’s still down).

I’ve found that I can play around with things like shifting the basenote of my instruments to compensate for the fact that using the computer keyboard I can only enter notes with octaves 4-6, but that seems kludgy (and obviously I’m still limited to only three octaves!)

Thanks

You can set the octave of the keyboard via the GUI here:

Also, the default key bindings for octave down/up are the keys [/] and [*] on your numeric keypad. You can rebind these to pretty much anything you like in the keyboard shortcuts section of the preferences.

Great, that definitely helps. So no way to enter the value of notes “manually” then?

I’m a little bit confused by what you mean now… Your computer keyboard in Renoise is laid out similar to a piano, so you have just over 2 octaves spread over the keys.

Here’s a shot taken from the quickstart tutorial PDF: (Should be located in your Renoise install directory)

I mean that In some cases I’d rather manually enter the value “D-2” in a field, rather than PLAYING the note (by hitting the key associated with that note). To manually edit the field similar to how one can the volume, effect, etc fields.

I want to cursor to a given field, then type the three keystrokes “D” “-” “2” to enter the value “D-2” instead of typing “X” to enter the value “D-2” (or numlock, /, /, numlock, C, oops, up arrow, X, which is what I keep having to do =)

Sometimes I logically know the note and octave I want to enter; I don’t want to PERFORM it. Maybe it’s just my particular approach to sequencing.

Oh! Hahahah… sorry. You might be surprised, but I have actually witnessed a few people who did not realise you could play notes via the keyboard.

Anyway, nope… it’s not possible to type in the actual letters and numbers that represent the notes. I’ve personally never seen this in any tracker that I can think of. Could you explain a bit more about why you would prefer to work this way? I’m just curious if you have some kind of ninja trick up your sleeve that would only work this way :)

Actually, the last time I did tracking was in the mid-90s, and the trackers I used worked this way. It also seems to be closer to the way I think about music, not being a pianist. More like writing music via sheet music than writing by performing it.

i don’t use the keyboard to play notes (except for the usual z to get a sample playing) so sometimes i’d like to be able to actually type in the note i want. it’s not a biggie tho but somehow it’s kind of counter intuitive that you can’t since it’s alfa-numeric data and all. (=

You don’t need to delete what you just entered, just go back and typ ontop of it, you should be able to quickly try all keys on the keyboard.
Once you get the hang of it its much quicker.

So instead of taking the easy but slow approach do yourself a favour and take the a bit longer to learn but lightningspeed approach.

You can also change the octave of entered notes by selecting them and pressing Alt+F11 up or Alt+F12 down.

So you’d like to press three keys to do something that can currently be done with one? :unsure:

Oh and what were these 90’s trackers that worked that way? Many of us have used a vast variety of them from Amiga onwards and it’s not something I can think of seeing. That’s the thing with the edit step, to do it that way it would have to move left to right, not top to bottom, or would have to wait for three key presses first.

DO you use both sharps and flats or use the sharp notation for everything and always use the hash (#) key?

Also there is Advanced edit if you really don’t like using the keyboard for notes. If you want to change something up/down you can by either a semi-tone or an octave. Obviously you need to have entered something first. (Alt F1/F1 seems to be Semitone down/up, Alt F11/F12 octave down/up of current selection, change Alt for Ctrl for current track or for Shift for whole pattern.)

Strangely I couldn’t find one that corrisponds to currently set mask in Advanced Edit. Personally I would prefer the keyboard shortcut that follow the settings in Advanced Edit and ability to set the masks from keyboard too.

there could be a default octave and the the second keypress would only be needed for sharps. as i said, no biggie. not a feature that i really need.

Yeah i get what Cacafuego means… infact, just yesterday while making a track for some reason my brain thought for a quick second that it was actully this way and i tried entering the “c” then “-” then the number…lol(I think it was the maryjane ;p). It would be usefull to be able to just type it…

niNja pWn3d

oh hold on pal. i self used a LOT of trackers / duration editors on c64 which used the direct note input.
there are HOUNDREDS of such programs.