Groove/Shuffle Question

Help, Support & Bugs
11

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

12

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.

13

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.

14

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.

15

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

16

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?

17

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:

18

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.

19

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.

20

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%

21

Thanks DBlue. I can hear it now. I usually use closed hats on every 2nd line and it doesn’t work if you do that.

22

I’m very pleased to have come across this thread as I spent some time trying to figure out the groove settings over the weekend. The thing that I still don’t really understand is that if I set the groove for 0&1 at 100%, I’d expect that note 0&1 should sound at the same time as 1&2, but this doesn´t seem to be the case. I realise that doing that would be a bit pointless most of the time, but I just can’t seem to get the kind of hard swing (a dotted eighth-sixteenth) that I would expect from adjusting 0&1 and 2&3 to 50% (which is what I think should be the “correct” value). Have I got the wrong end of the stick?

23

The values of the groove settings are completely nonsense, just like the “explanation” (Renoise Wiki - Groove Settings) is. Already simply trying the example described in the manual shows, it does not work like it’s described there.

Quote: “In other words, a groove of 25% means the first note will be extended to 125%, while the second note will be shortened to 75% and triggered with a 25% delay, creating the groove/swing. Technically speaking, a 100% groove would mean that the second note is triggered together with the third.”

Well, if you do so and set all values to 100, you can hear the pink pony galloping, but never 2 notes triggered at the same time. The calculation of the timing is simply wrong, just like the explanation in the tutorial is.

If you want to achieve a normal (nearly) 25% groove (like for common house trax) set all sliders to 37%, for a more subtile (nearly) 12% groove set all sliders to 18%.

Now, anyone noticed it??? 25 hexadecimal = 37 decimal, 12 hexadecimal = 18 decimal. I already told month ago there seems to be some data type conversion bug. But hey, back then none cared about it and I really don’t think it’s gonna be different this time. If I were an admin, I’d have already put a [solved] in front of the thread (just an insider :wink: SCNR).

Well, at least now you know how to calculate your settings. Enter your desired (decimal!) groove value like it is as a hexadecimal into some calculator and convert it to decimal then: Voila, your groove setting value. But you better still don’t expect the groove settings to work like you’d think , when trying to set up a more complex groove, even if you understood the tutorial in the manual. Because as soon as you enter different values in some lines instead of pairs, your groove becomes uncontrollable nonsense with exactly every 2nd beat (quarter note).

24

The description is indeed wrong here. 100% shifts by 2/3rd of the original line duration.

This does not really make it easier to use and understand though. Maybe we should replace this percentage slider thing, with a notation where you place the line times directly.

  
straight:  
[1] [2] [3] [4] > Lines  
-|----|----|----|------------  
 * * * * > Timing  
  
shuffle:  
[1] [2] [3] [4] > Lines  
-|----|----|----|------------  
 * * * * > Timing

Does this make more sense?

There are also strange things happening when using other LPB than 4, which are very hard to explain, but maybe easier to demonstrate and edit this way.

I thought you wanted to be an outsider? :wink: SCNR

25

To me not really. Seriously. It shows what a groove does, but not how the settings work. And the “100% shifts by 2/3rd of a line.” doesn’t make any sense to me, even less from a musicians point. And it doesn’t explain the reason for the messed up groove with every 2nd beat. If the groove settings would work like described in the manual everything would be fine, because actually it’s not that hard to understand. But everyone trying out what he read in the manual automatically thinks “Huh, that’s completely different. I’ve done it wrong. But I have no idea what ‘it’ is. So it must be complicated…”.

The exactly matching of the decimal/hex converion is a coincidence? It really works, as exactly as it can with the integer percents. I analysed several samples of example grooves for this and the result is exactly what it should be. EDIT: while I haven’t tried values above 50 (dec).

I guess I still am. I have to confess I fired up Renoise pretty often in the past few weeks, when I got some new ideas to realize, because I liked the new instrument features. But I also must say, most times it didn’t take me too long to shut it down again afterwards, because really many, many things didn’t work as expected or are missing in the new features. I really hate Renoise for the stuff it’s not able to handle, despite its potential for it. And I love it for the stuff it IS able to handle. As we all know, love and hate are pretty close related to each other. ;)

Maybe I should visit the Renoisers Anonymous…

26

I’ve never had any problems with the groove-feature. Ok, I’ve never used it to pinpoint an exact groove-value (like “I want a 25% groove”). I’ve always moved the sliders around until I hear what I want.

Usually it ends up in something like this:
Slide 1: higher %-value
Slide 2: lower %-value
Slide 3: same as slide 1
Slide 4: same as slide 2

And I tend to use groove alot in my songs. Maybe I just got used to the Renoise-version of groove.

27

I’d have to agree with this. Like Robbie S says, maybe it’s just a matter of tinkering and getting the right feeling by trial and error, but so far I haven’t had much luck with that. The way that groove was implemented in Reason tended to work very nicely in terms of “feel” (I’m talking about a very old version here, not sure about the new ones), but the actual way the settings worked was a bit mysterious, which I was never happy about. I think that the best thing would be to have a clear explanation of how the existing settings work, first of all. It seems that there is the whole issue about what 100% means, but also about how the settings work relate to the LPB value used. I’m sure that there should be a really clear way of doing this in Renoise.

28

I just made a basic testsong, and this kinda seems to work. I could be doing this the total wrong way tho. I was just fiddeling around.

What i did is put all groove sliders on 100% and then every 2 steps i use the pattern code F401 F400 F401 F400 etc (Pattern groove on/off)
This was the effect i was looking for all that time. now i also did a -5MS track delay on the bassdrum just for that slight extra shuffle effect.

You can clearly hear the effect on the closed hihat track.

Still maybe im doing this totally wrong i don’t know.

It looks like this on the closed hihat track.

C-401 10 F401

      • … 0000
        C-401 10 F400
      • … 0000
        C-401 20 F401
      • … 0000
        C-401 20 F400
      • … 0000

NOTE : Just noticed that this method messes up the wav-renderer, you have to add lots of empty patterns at the end of the song otherwise the wav-renderer will stop at a random pattern even when “entire song” is selected in the renderer screen.

29

so with the groove setting you cant have it assigned to its individual track? groove must be applied on the whole song? am i the only one seeing that this is really lame?

30

@Yung: yes, groove settings are applied to the whole song. i don’t really see the importance of different per-track grooves tho, i’ld rather have a per-track groove quantize amount (all tracks quantize with different strength to the same groove pattern).

side note: one single slider for the groove settings helps quite a bit finding the ‘right groove’ imo. 1 or 2% can actually make a difference and setting all 4 sliders is kinda nasty. so i find myself using the dAnushri tool for that, even when i’m not using it in a song. [/self-promotion].
It’s kindof essential to use the ‘correct’ bpm value if you want to use renoise’s groove settings, i usually had bpm set to a ‘doubled’ value (like, 160 instead of 80), which makes the settings completely useless, took me a while to figure that out x)