Funny I don’t recall exactly how I came across Renoise either. I just know that when I did it was a natural choice as:
This website is the bible with regards to popular electronic music:
http://www.periodictableofsynthpop.com/bands/periodic_table.htm
One such band I found there was Iris.
Iris is so good. I love all their albums.
Andrew Sega, who joined the band on the second album, was a well known tracker musician named Necros.
I was like, “whats a demoscene?” A… “tracker?” “Is that like sending cassette tapes in the mail to one another?”
I watched this video by Sega, and I was blown away by the technology:
At the time, I guess Buzz was promising. Renoise is mentioned.
After considering the history of trackers and where the industry standard is today, I stumbled across Renoise as the only contender to modern day tracker production.
Being a Reason 10 user, Renoise may be the perfect companion. Instead of thinking of music as a linear sequence, as audio tracks and real-time recording, Renoise takes pattern-based production to the extreme. It just makes sense with my own habits in electronic music production. The amazing aspect of every sound as a sample, as well as being able to control VSTs.
I can continue to make synthpop and my own self-contained sound engines. A new way to make acid house and chiptunes. Any genre is possible with Renoise!
For me, it was this album by she:
This led to me using the Demo of Renoise back in 2008, then buying the full program after I realized I had racked up hundreds of hours in the demo. Previous experience with LSDJ on the Gameboy also helped. While I tried Ableton and Logic as well, the workflow and speed at which one can make a track in Renoise has not been matched for me yet; seeing my producer friends painstakingly click in notes in a piano roll always reminds me how natural and fast tracker systems are for composition.
Same experience here concerning Reason10. Just couldn’t get anything to sound as it was “supposed” to. After 2 years of using nothing but, I recently discovered ReNoise and naturally consider it my DAW of choice. I used FastTracker2 back in the day but up to this point thought nothing of the sort would have survived the passage of time. I know quite a few of us here feel the same and just after a few days I can tell Renoise has a community on a level of its own. I am grateful for such an amazing DAW. There is just something sooo special about it! Just maybe everything about it. And the themes… and options to customize… the most beautiful cherry to top it off! On a last note, yes, Reason has “a sound” or maybe lack of one… Renoise on the other hand sounds exactly as it should!
When I was 11 which is 28 yrs ago 
there were scream tracker, impulse tracker and then a bit later fast tracker 2, later modplug tracker if I remember correctly. Since then I love mods.
In 2013 I met Renoise and it became my first paid program ever. Now 7 year later I still struggle to know renoise well so I had few escapes to Ableton, Maschine, Reaper etc. The interesting thing here is that trackers are much more complete and I had to explore almost every DAW to realize that! I don’t regret spent time as it gave me many perspectives to make music.
Since I have somehow writer’s block for almost 3 months now and I spent majority of time in programming activities because of new work I decided that renoise is somehow programming to me and will use it exclusively and not waste any more time. This means that I am going to spend more time to learn it properly.
Thanks for renoise! Wish me luck and good understanding <3 Have a nice day guys.
Gave up Reason this month…
impulse tracker - 1998 (DAN 486 DX, 33MHz)
boss sp505 - 2003
mpc1000 - 2007
skale tracker (1st tried renoiose demo around here I think) - 2007
LittleGameparkTracker, LSDJ, Nanoloop (big distractions, only LGPT has true BPM for sampling out into renoise) - 2007
2008 - milkytracker on a PDA (HP iPaq 214, enterprise, super awesome)
Renoise + Sunvox on PDA - 2010
ipad stuff - 2012 (wasnt worth it, except sunvox)
2013 - Back to renoise and sunvox, and milkytracker (greatest ways of making music)
2018 - started looking into adlib tracker again, never understood it in the impulse tracker days, like when it came on a floppy disk on the front of a magazine like ‘PCworld’ (awesome)
2018-2020 (hardcore renoise only for a while)
future - renoise and sunvox only + Gstomper for android, GBA nanoloop and a few vsti
Long Live the best operating system MS-DOS and the very best music tracker F.T. II !!!
With 486 DX2 and monochrome display “Ray”, I started using this two things in 1997.
With empty fields, without any sample or instrument, there was no fun, except game of Snake. That’s why I liked FT II. :).
Then, latter, I was figure out how to connect some devices to sound card, like audio tape player or turntable. And the real fun was began…
…and fun was ended in 1999., when CIH (Chernobyl virus) cover my computer. I lost all my files.
Then, latter, in time of XP, I try refresh some ideas, what I was made earlier. But something went wrong and I gave up.
From time to time, from Acid to FL, I was tried do some things with samples in this software. And then I find Renoise.
Hi all, new member here.
Well, I share the same heritage as a number of people here, starting out using trackers on the Amiga. OctaMED was the main one. Then I used FastTracker II on the PC for a while. A friend from school used to come over and he would give me ideas and I would implement them. It was fun. If I still had the files, the sound quality would probably sound quite unrefined compared to what can be achieved these days, and it was probably a bit repetitive in places. But the trade off was that I actually finished my tracks and felt good about it, rather than what I do nowadays which is constantly fiddle and experiment with everything and not achieve so much.
Then I had a long time away from it all, doing other things musically like playing flute in a couple of amateur orchestras. More recently I have family commitments and can’t get out in the evenings so much, so I’ve stopped that for now.
In around 2016 I bought a second hand license for Bitwig v1 and had some fun using that. But my music keyboard skills are not the best, and when using the computer keyboard with Bitwig, you only have access to one octave at a time, and there is no step entry functionality, which I find quite poor.
Then I started experimenting with Reaper and the Hackey Trackey tracker plugin. It was quite fun, but I just found MIDI editing with Reaper to be more effort than it should be.
After that I used FL Studio for around 18 months. Note entry is quite good with a computer keyboard, being similar to the method used by trackers. But the keyboard shortcuts can’t be changed and some are hardwired to a numeric keypad, which isn’t great when you use a laptop without one.
In the background I’d been experimenting with Renoise for several years, and I got round to purchasing it recently.
I’m more into synthesis than using samples though, so recently I upgraded my Bitwig license to version 3 and I like experimenting with creating synths inside The Grid. But I still like the tracker way of entering notes. At the moment I’m using Renoise to control Bitwig using MIDI. Then I can use Renoise as the sequencer, which is great. I can still record the MIDI to Bitwig clips if I want to. I have both programs open side by side.
Honestly I must spend more time thinking about and refining my workflow than actually achieving much musically. I have all these short, unfinished tracks, because I find the process of expanding on them to be slow and unmotivating. At least it is a hobby rather than having to do it for a living 
Many users coming from Reason it seems.
I used to make music on Amiga computers. First in Pro tracker and later Digibooster Pro.
But I got more and more limited because the Amiga was aging hardware and there was no perspective on new hardware or software.
Then in 2002 Renoise came along. I think I used it from version 1.11 and registered at 1.2 until this day.
Started with FastTracker 2 in the early-mid 90’s.
Suppose my first look at Renoise was around then,
but it may have been called something else… not sure.
The old link was:
[ NoiseTrekker - Files Area ]
www.geocities.com / SiliconValley/Monitor/5269/download.htm
Then, sometime around 2000, I had a look at Renoise but
choose MadTracker 2 since it had full compatibility with my
previous tracker… sigh
Now, recently, while going over some old browser links; had
a fresh look at Renoise in 2020 (the Software, Videos, the
Documentation, and the nice Forums), bought it on the spot!
Thanks for the great tracker 
…guess i should have been braver in 2000
Seems like a good place for a first post.
Briefly - I got into playing guitar and skateboarding and wearing shit clothes and recording songs in my bedroom with an 8 track. Used guitars and Behringer foot pedals, an 80s keyboard, a Zoom drum machine and an SM58 for vox. Was in heaven.
Fast forward 18 years of bands, recording, sex / drugs / hard rock and various music / sound engineering diplomas and degrees, I’m not a professional musician but I still write and record like my life depends on it.
These days I play a lot of baritone guitar and drums although I’m not exactly brilliant at either. I also like to sing / shout / scream and mess around with synthesis. In the past I’ve used Cubase, Logic, Pro Tools and Ardour extensiely but settled on Reaper about a decade ago.
Last year, however, I kinda just started using Reason. Massive fan of Reason.
Fast forward to summer 2020 however, and I become a Dad. This means I have no time to spend in my ‘studio’ (i.e. soon to be my bairn’s bedroom…!), which means that the only chances I get to make music are little short sessions using my laptop on the couch or wherever. Unfortunately, my laptop is quite shit.
Fast forward to December 2020 and I get flashbacks to my Linux days. Ardour ran but without MIDI and my machine could only handle a few audio tracks at a time. Someone recommended Renoise and I had a license for v2 I think and I remember it worked brilliantly on my shit hardware but for whatever reason I never really got stuck in.
I stress-tested the demo a week ago and was thrilled by the performance on my shit laptop.
So aye, here I am. Got v3.2 and cannot wait to have a bit of time on my hands and get my teeth into Renoise.
That was quite a story .Welcome to the forum and congrats on being a Dad
Thanks stoiximan. Even though it’s a long(ish) post, that’s still the short version of my story…
Anyway this seems like a good community and I look forward to getting my head around Renoise and getting involved.
I’m one of those who had no previous tracker experience. I’m old enough that I had an Atari ST and freinds with Amigas but can’t remember ever seeing trackers back then and I’m pretty sure I’d have struggled to get my head around them in those old ‘copied disks with no manuals’ days in any case!
My history with trying to make music has been complicated by personal/health issues but the short version is that in 20 years of sporadic dabbling I never really made it past the very first part of learning a program and getting stuck in the ‘trying to make the perfect loop before doing anything else’ trap.
Earlier this year I decided to quickly make a ‘finished’ track in Ableton Live no matter how terrible it was just to get that monkey off my back. Since then I’ve done quite a few and in the process of learning Live and Push I started to run into frustrations with that process. The Push 2 is an amazing piece of hardware but it’s not used to anything like its full potential by the program and they seem to be content for it to be the way it is… And I’m not really happy with that considering the high cost of a Live Suite and Push 2 setup.
By chance I happened to read the Autechre AMA from a few years back and Renoise was mentioned several times. At one point someone asks ‘What item under $100 would you suggest to someone who wanted to start making music?’ and the answer was Renoise. Coming from Autechre that’s very high praise, so I had to try it.
I can’t lie, the first few days were absolutely painful. I was literally going to bed with a headache every night, but part of me was enjoying the learning curve and could see the potential benefits. It pointed me in a very different direction to how I did things in Live, where it’s perhaps a little too easy to always have your options open working with MIDI and get lost in the endless possibilities. To get anything done there I had to set myself arbirtrary limitations (an entire track using only this synth, etc.) Obviously Renoise can function that way too but I think it ‘suggests’ committing to things more and I like that.
My main concern was how straightforward it would be to make music that doesn’t typically seem to be done on trackers, stuff that has a more human feel in the timing, and it quickly became obvious that this was very possible - I could imagine someone like J. Dilla sounding as organic as ever in Renoise. In the last couple of weeks (helped by the fresh VST3 support) I decided to sell my Live Suite and Push 2, probably just keeping a copy of Live Intro so I can still do feedback loop stuff. Pretty drastic to go from that and working almost entirely with MIDI to Renoise and much more sample-based, but I think it’s the right decision because I simply had more fun doing the track I made in Renoise than I did in any of those in Live.
Damn, I tried to make this post short too…
Ha-ha! Same here! Like “Wow! What a nice loop I made and… aaa… eeee… and nice loop I made” and then “Have a nice trap!” No ideas how to jump out of loop and to lazy too.
I first was usin NTK (if that it was called). Then it became Renoise which we all know it now
Despite using Amiga trackers back in the day making demos etc., I had not thought of using them again until the Polyend Tracker came out and caught my eye. I thought I would try the workflow before ordering a hardware tacker (I am a bit of a hardware guy…MPC, Electron, Eurorack etc) and came across Renoise via Google!
Long story short, I bought Renoise, Redux (used in Live and Bitwig) and a Polyend Tracker
Are you able to share any of the resources you used to learn sound design?
Scream Tracker 3 was the first sequencing software I really sunk my teeth into. I was only like 8 years old or so, so I wasn’t doing anything particularly noteworthy then, but I remember also having a copy of some version of Cakewalk for Windows 3.1 and laboriously dragging notes out one by one and thinking “Why is this so hard? It’s easy in the tracker.” I was spoiled from the beginning.
Fast forward some time. Buzz came out, and I used that a bit - got into that plugin workflow, although I always struggled with how the pattern sequencing worked, my brain just didn’t like having everything split out instead of being there on the page. I also used Psycle which I did better with. And then I dabbled with a cracked FL Studio in college and successfully recorded some things with that, but didn’t stick with it when I next upgraded computers. By the late 2000’s, I was very much a music dabbler and read CM Magazine and everything else that the bookstores had. If I didn’t learn about Renoise there, it was probably just by searching for new trackers.
But even so, I’ve gone back and forth with using Renoise and trying other things. There have been two things that always bother me. The first is that I had some training in classical trumpet during my school years, and I just could not find a computer composing experience that let me get the sense of immediate expression I would be able to get by performing a piece with a real brass instrument, controlling both articulation and dynamics with precision. I thought perhaps having pitch and mod wheels on my keyboard would do this - not really, though. It turns out that after all this time, tracker effect columns are still the fastest way to get what I want, that kind of fine-grained manipulation.
The second thing is with music theory. My training only covered enough to suggest that I should know how to transpose things between different keys, which I did very poorly. So when I first started writing I would make chiptunes in some kind of counterpoint-esque style that I ground out by trial and error, drawing on the interlocking melodies often found in trumpet pieces, and then set simple rock beats to them. While I’ve learned a few more concepts since then, I see it as a weakness that I don’t “think” too much in terms of pitch and chord, mostly leaning on rhythm and timbre - because invariably, I will gravitate towards the comfort zone of my muscle memory and just play the same kinds of things over and over. And here, I thought, perhaps if I used an isomorphic key layout, I would be more fluid with my scales, since those layouts make it easy to transpose. This is sort of true - I’ve put money into getting not one but two isomorphic MIDI controllers(Axis49 and Chromatone), and in OpenMPT I set up keybindings for an isomorphic layout. And those do create a certain kind of fluidity, making it trivial to switch scales and modes. Isomorphics are delightful and I recommend them heartily if you want to get an intuitive grasp of theory. But they don’t really tell me how to create a chord progression, either…
…which has led me on a chase through various theory-assistance software, and even writing some of my own algorithmic music generation. Most of it is kind of dreadful in that it’s never configurable in quite the right way for what you’re doing. It generates a basic result fast, and then you’re constantly like “OK, I just want to write this adjustment but I have to try to force it through the software’s concepts”. I’ve settled into using arranger-style software(Chordpulse is my current favorite of them - very, very easy to click together something) as the cornerstone since it gives you a fairly generic starting point, but then the issue is with how to continue developing it from there.
And so I’ve been reviewing options this month and eventually thought to come back to Renoise, with an eye towards using it like a kind of “Protracker++” - the main sequence should be small and fairly sparse, easy to keep a handle on and to modify in large chunks. But that sequence can contain complex phrases and FX chains. Basically, to work at a level that is not so much note-by-note, but phrase-by-phrase.