My first DAW was Ableton Live. I was working in education at the time, so I got it for the education discount of ~$350 per version (!!!) and was still struggling with the fact that all the virtual instrument sounds and “real” synthesizer Operator cost extra above that license – the full version was over $500 (educational) and I just felt like I wasn’t getting that much out of the tool. I was using it as a glorified VST host, playing with the sound stretching features, but not getting far beyond a surface-level use of the tool.
At a certain point, I couldn’t justify the cost to upgrade, and I started looking around for other alternatives. I played with Reaper for a while, messed with GarageBand, and they were serviceable enough.
Then I downloaded the free demo of Renoise 2.9, and quickly was able to do everything i did in Live. I was struck by all the community-sourced XRNI instruments that instantly gave me access to a huge variety of expressive sounds. Just finding jbborgoin’s collection of instruments opened up a world of possibilities that I was missing in Live.
I was initially daunted by the tracker interface, but quickly learned how it actually helps speed up your workflow, allowing you to quickly get ideas out of your head and into the DAW. I love that it’s actually designed to work well on the regular computer keyboard, without being too dependent on an external MIDI controller (which I didn’t have at the time) or a mouse. When I discovered GuttRoll, a Renoise Tool that lets you input notes on a guitar neck rather than a piano roll, I realized the power of Renoise’s extensibility and awesome community of devs. That tool opened up my ability to use all my background guitar knowledge to create chord progressions, rather than having to relearn them on a piano first.
It was at this point where I actually started doing some deep reading and learning about sound design, and understanding how to actually build sounds up from a waveform to the kinds of sounds I’m used to hearing in recordings. I realized that Renoise has all the tools you need to serve as a sound design workspace. In fact, the whole app serves as a giant modular synthesizer tool, with all the component pieces of a synth you could ever want to build up any experimental weird tools you want. Now, I often see ads for new VST plugins and instruments, and I instantly know how I could build something similar using Renoise’s built-in tools. For this reason, it feels like such a great value to have so much capability for so little cash.
“You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don’t even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead. Hey uh, you want a drink?”
-Cypher, The Matrix
And while it feels limitless in some ways, in some ways it also reminds me of the limitations that all my music heroes had to wrestle with when they made all my favorite tunes in the 70s/80s/90s. They were using 16-step sequencer drum machines and samplers that only held kilobytes of data – mere seconds of borrowed sounds – and used those to make most of the dance music I’ve ever shaken my butt to. I like that the basic tasks of chopping samples and sequencing them on a grid are the same in Renoise as they would’ve been on the iconic hardware tools my heroes have used all along. It’s a reminder that we have access to so many bells and whistles in modern DAWs that we don’t really need, and that Renoise has everything we need to produce great music.
Lastly, I found myself craving the experience of tracking in Renoise. I get a weird “brain buzz” from working with the Matrix-style tracker grid interface that I can’t explain – am I alone in this? Not only is it hacker-cool and I feel like a badass when I show my friends the interface, but I have this little addiction to clicking around the grid and crafting rhythms. Where other DAWs feel like a chore to open up, Renoise is this little thrill that I’ll open up when I want a dopamine hit. I even installed a copy on my work computer so I can take quick breaks at work, electrify my mind for a while, and then get back to some other task.
For all these reasons, I love working with Renoise and I’m glad to learn from you all about how you use it as well!