Groove/Shuffle Question

Hi Guys.

Small question and its probably been asked a few times before but…

How exactly can i make the Groove Setting sound right in the “song settings” tab?, it never really made sense to me. And somehow i never can get it to sound “right” for some reason.
i know that around “35%” groove is about the maximum before it starts to sound “unnatural”

I remember in the past you could either put “delay/speed” pattern codes to make it groove, or you just had a simple single “groove” slider which always sounded perfect (NoiseTrekker 2/3) and was just much easier to use imho.

If i want to make the 4 groove sliders work as 1 slider (as NoiseTrekker 2/3 had), how to set the 4 sliders properly to emulate the (1-slider) effect?

Best explanation I’ve ever seen of it.

Probably :D but even more confusing to me lol.

The thing is, with single slider shuffles i never had any problems. but this 4 slider groove system drive me nuts, i just can’t get it to sound right for some reason.

I agree. I prefer the groove settings of Reason, or on the 909 or 808. You turn a knob a bit, and it sounds “groovy”. Renoise’s system; Meh. You tweak around with it and it never really sounds that good.

try with delay column on one pattern and when is “groovy” enough paste the delay pattern all over the tracks

Meh. (quote)

Someone should make an easy and good groove-tool!

Agreed!

Btw i use LPB 8 (around 140BPM), so whats the best way to use the Delay’s in the pattern?

I thought there already was.
I don’t know if it is as easy as you had in mind though…
http://tools.renoise.com/tools/groove-tool

yeah, I have that tool, but it does strange things in its current incarnation, or maybe I need to upgrade it? Dragging one of the sliders or changing other parameters in the tool 'cause all note events to disappear.

Errr, now it does seem to work, probably I need to try this one out more often! :)

i think the groove settings should be revisited by the dev team. if even dblue says they are ‘indeed weird’, how are any of us mere mortals going to make sense of them? will try and muck around with these some more tonight.

In the meanwhile im going to try that groove-tool out :)

To be perfectly honest I find the values quite meaningless anyway. The only thing that matters to me is: ‘does this sound good?’

So for my personal workflow I usually just set all 4 sliders to the same value, and if that value sounds pretty good for my song then I’m happy.

Thats what i tried as well. all the sliders less LPB more LPB different slider-settings. And always when i think “this sounds right” its still a bit “off”.
So i just can’t get it to sound perfect for some reason.

I think we just need a “Simple-Groove” (1-slider) and “Advanced-Groove” (4-sliders) in song settings. Or maybe as a “Track-DSP” to groove individual tracks.

yeah i get what you mean. but i think it should be both… even with meaningful sliders you can still just focus on whether it sounds good or not.

with respect to your workflow: i thought i once made a suggestion for an option to chain/link/connect sliders, so you could move 1 slider and it would move the linked slider(s) with it. can’t find it though. but it would make your life easier i suppose.

It’s almost impossible to hear the difference between groove turned off, the presets and a bunch of random settings.

tried it out yesterday and that was my impression as well. but i work at quite a high speed (360bpm, 8lpb) so i figure that could be the reason?

Hi :) It would be greet if this function can be make more easy to access in the next Renoise update. For me, a dude who normally use Cubase its sometimes really hard, to understand how its work in Renoise :blush:

I agree. The Groove function is a bit of a let-down. Nobody understands it and it hardly seems to do anything.

I think the best groove/swing settings I’ve come across on a DAW would be Reason. And you can do per-track settings too.

Maybe the groove settings aren’t the same as what you’d find in other software, but the feature itself works fine and is perfectly capable of grooving/shuffling/swaaaanging the shit out of your beats.

The concept itself is really not complicated at all: The amount of groove is applied to each alternating 16th note in your pattern. If you’re working at 4 LPB then a 16th note = 1 pattern line, if you’re working at 8 LPB then a 16th note = 2 pattern lines, and so on…

Just set up a very basic 16th note sequence of closed highhats or rimshots or some other percussive sound. Enable groove and set all the sliders to around 40% - 50%. If you toggle groove on and off every few seconds while the pattern is playing, you should easily be able to hear the effect.

Here’s a quick example file:
2194 dblue-groovy-808-beat.xrns

Just toggle groove on and off while this pattern is playing.

Thanks, it seems that my song with all sliders on either 35% or 40% does the trick!
I use LPB 8 and 140BPM.

Also these settings sounds very nice :

0&1 - 35%
1&2 - 0%
2&3 - 35%
3&4 - 0%