TL/DR: I would love a NLE pattern arranger that behaves something like the arranger in sunvox. The idea is that patterns of different lengths can be laid out on a timeline, concurrently, as one shots or loops depending on drawn length and potentially retimed with internally interpolated timescales.
If a tool like this exists in the plugin ecosystem that’s great, please let me know.
Some background:
I’m still using Renoise for composition. It’s simply the fastest way for me to get my ideas out, though my workflow has become far less sample based these days and relies a lot more heavily on using VST instruments.
The issue that I have is that my compositional goals are not loopy and haven’t been for a while. I’m more in a mind to construct looong slow spaces with transient, unique melodic passages going through them. I find the grid and looping-ostenato-centrism of Renoise to be a bit unwieldy with this. For a recent project I wound up working around this mostly by rendering stuff out and then arranging and mixing the results in reaper. It’s understood that there are workaround, but the truth is that having to jump between applications and pre-stage parts of a composition disrupts the very flow that makes Renoise and the tracker in general such a joy to work in.
I’m staring a new project and am currently looking into approaching some of what I’m trying to do with one-shot phrases (which are awesome) and arranging these in long patterns. This actually gets me quite close to the goal. Phrases can have their own internal timescales that are independent from the host pattern. The issue is that they are pretty opaque as objects in the pattern editor since they are abstracted away behind a root note instrument entry (ie: I have to remember that C-4 05 is an ascending glissando phrase at triple time).
I’ve considered other tools. Hockey-Trackey for Reaper was one considered option, as well as BitWig, but there is simply nothing that behaves as transparently for me to actually write melodic passages as Renoise. A meta-step upwards in the arranging model seems like a graceful and logical next-step for this amazing tool.
Thank you Renoise team for all that you do. It’s been an amazing 25 years together
I think it refers to non-linear editing, seen in other more conventional software for editing video or audio. Renoise kinda has non-linear editing because you can arrange patterns in any order but it’s locked to pattern lengths and you can’t misalign patterns easily.
Basically something with a timeline that allows you to jump around in time and make edits where ever you’d like. FinalCut Pro is an NLE for Video. Reaper is an NLE for audio.
I guess this might be the more workable solution because Renoise is probably locked to the pattern-by-pattern arrangement on the higher level. But showing a phrase in the Editor has the issue that Phrases can have notes off the grid of the main pattern and also notes in more columns, both of which would be hard to imagine visually inside a single column in the Pattern Editor.
This is why I think the current top-level pattern editor isn’t really ideal for this. The ideas&suggestions forum is littered with the ghosts of lots of UI proposals to show the duration of entered elements including vertical FFTs for samples and so on. In theory it would be helpful to simply show the relative phrase length for phrased instrument note entries.
On the other hand the existing arranger generates little thumbnail previews of pattern data. So moving this concept off the pattern editor into a rethinking of the arranger would perhaps be more idiomatic since the idea is to assemble pattern data in time to create compositions.
edit:
thinking about this a bit more, I can see that pulling on this thread pretty quickly unravels a lot of fundamental design choices in Renoise. For example:
currently patterns have access to all tracks in the project. being able to concurrently sequence patterns adjacent to one another leads to potential issues if tracks aren’t fully owned by their host patterns.
a potential workaround to this would be to allow users to sequence data within a single track and then arrange single track patterns across the projects defined tracks, however…this breaks one of the fundamental modes of the tracker interface (cohesive ways to aggregate programming of multiple instruments together into related patterns). supporting the current workflow while expanding into my proposed on is quite a design challenge
the ideally you could simply assign a pattern you want to run to any free track in your project, but the way fx are bound to the track makes them less interchangeable than that. adding fx-chains to pattern/clip containers is a workaround but maybe muddies the waters a bit further
patterns/phrases available for sequences would ideally exist someplace for reference and assignment (ie: a library within the project of phrases/patterns you’ve written that can be used) this creates another UI development/design challenge
I hope these extra notes don’t seem like me giving up on the idea. I’m often working with designers as a programmer in technical art projects and, when they start sentences with “Can’t we just…?” it usually means I’m in for a world of hurt. So I’m not trying to be that guy. I’d be curious about how worthwhile such an undertaking is seen by the community and the devs.
