Hello all. I don’t frequent these forums very often, but I hope I can eventually contribute something big to the community.
So I spent the last month or so learning Ruby and Sonic Pi. And wowie zowie, is it easy to get a crazy awesome beat in SP. But SP is getting frustrating because it’s impossible to write a song with transitions. Renoise is baby’s-first-DAW, and when I’m doing anything in SP, I always get homesick, and wish I had a tracker interface and pattern editor. So after I read the READ-ME for the Renoise scripting API, and saw that Algorithmic composition is very possible, I knew I had to put my efforts into this.
But I don’t know where to start.
About my programming skills:
I’m not new to programming; I’m learning signal processing in MATLAB next semester. What I am very unfamiliar with, is file-handling, building and managing libraries, working with terminals. I’ve never used an API before. Even worse, I only really became fully comfortable with OOP when I just learned Sonic Pi; I finally had a practical reason to write big class structures.
I attempted to learn Lua, expecting it to be as easy as it was to pick up Ruby. Boy was I wrong. The whole idea of making your own OOP paradigms seems awesome, but I’m already having trouble with the stateless and stateful iterators.
SP was so easy to jump into. The documentation gives easily understandable explanations for using the SP features. It touches on educating the reader on basic electronic music composition. But it goes so far that it also explains very simple programming paradigms like setting variables! I won’t need that much hand-holding of course, but it was very easy to learn SP because the docs were geared towards teaching children. But more importantly, there are examples EVERYWHERE. I didn’t have to learn anything when I started. I just copied and pasted code, then changed some numbers, then added parameters, then swapped out fx units, etc. This made it easy to figure out what SP could and couldn’t do. Then after messing around like this, I buckled down and got serious, learning all the technical details.
My point is that I wish the Renoise docs were this easy. I don’t know where to start with this! I’m sure all of what I need is in Renoise.song.api.lua, but I don’t know what to do with that information. So maybe I do need some hand-holding. I need examples to illustrate the concepts to me.
To narrow things down, I’d be very satisfied if someone could explain this in particular:
- how to put random notes in the pattern matrix, where the notes are chosen randomly from an array/table of notes I specify.
-how to specify the time to ‘rest’ in-between each note.
If anyone could spoonfeed that to me, I could probably figure out the rest myself. If you’re feeling generous, how do I do a similar thing with VST instrument parameters? And with Renoise’s built-in effects?
If this was as easy as Sonic Pi, I wouldn’t be asking you to write code for me, but I really don’t know where to begin.
TLDR : I want to do algorithmic composition in Renoise.I want easy, fully explained examples so I can have a jumping-off-point. I’m willing to put in hard work (i.e., learn Lua and study API docs), but I don’t know where to begin at all. So give me some examples pretty pleeeaaasseeeee.
Thanks for the help so much! I really need it.