how do you compose in renoise? (its bleeping difficult)

Help, Support & Bugs Beginners Questions - Renoise
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I am just faster at expressing myself on a guitar, so that’s what I do. If I were a pianist, I’d have a massive USB keyboard in front of me and do my composing straight in Renoise, using simple sine waves. It just isn’t part of the workflow at which Renoise is particularly efficient, that’s all. If the original poster was trying to compose by guessing and typing in notes, that’s probably not an efficient workflow - that’s what I was trying to point out.

I think I work similarly, just that I grab one of my kalimbas/ka r imbas/mbiras (they’re all in different keys, which is my excuse to have eight of them currently), come up with something that sounds interesting, then type in the notes in Renoise. I don’t need more than two and a half octaves usually, so this helps. Occasionally, I use also an ukulele for making noise, too (easier for chords, though I struggle with string instruments). I sometimes ponder the idea of learning (musical) keyboard or piano playing, but I don’t know. I find them so bulky and I can’t easily walk around with a keyboard or sit in a corner/etc. I’ve noticed that my musical creativity seems to be somehow linked to mobility and movement. If I sit in the same place, I find it much harder to come up with ideas, and I also can’t do it just in my head like some folks can (I need an instrument).

Reading this thread, the conclusion is pretty much that “it depends”. I get results faster in Renoise + non-keyboard acoustic instrument than I do with a piano roll based DAW (I’ve recently fallen in love with Tracktion 5, but that’s mostly for audio recording, especially because of how it handles recording multiple takes and comping), but this may be different for people who click in all notes, or who are pianists/keyboarders. Actually, I just realized that because my instruments don’t always (or usually) have strict or identical layouts, I’m not “thinking” in a piano layout at all, but in notes, by name and number. So seeing the text label C4 or G#5 in a grid is more meaningful to me than a visual representation based on a piano keyboard (yes, many piano rolls can display the text labels, too, but the notes themselves are still arranged in a linear piano layout). Additionally, kalimba/etc. tabs are vertical, too, precisely like trackers. (Looks like this.)

So anyway, I don’t think it can be generalized that method A is always faster or better than method B, or vice versa. It just depends on what you’re used to and how you work/think.

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A very very interesting thread. Very inspirational. I’ve been always very interested in how different music-making software interfaces influence on the actual composition. I think it’s a whole field worth of even academic/scientific research.

I think I work similarly, just that I grab one of my kalimbas/ka r imbas/mbiras (they’re all in different keys, which is my excuse to have eight of them currently), come up with something that sounds interesting, then type in the notes in Renoise…

I just open Renoise, find an interesting sounding instrument and use the qwerty keyboard. Add some effects, sketch a melody, move things around and then iterate and soon enough things start to evolve in more macro structure.

I find the comment that renoise forces you to focus on compositional details quite close to the (subjective) truth. I also think that this forces you to think of the macro structure in your head (that’s why I really really hate “pattern sequence matrix” - as it forces you, well me, to stop imagining the structure, and stop hearing the the macro structure, and it’s a visualisation with blocks that I move around and mute or copy).

Don’t know how it works with other software so much but FL’s piano roll is basically like Renoise, when the song isn’t playing drawing a note in the piano roll will cause the instrument to play that note so you can just hold the mouse button and drag it around until you hear the pitch you were looking for. I actually run into this problem more in Renoise if I forget to set edit step back to 0. It’d be cool if there was something like a pause step key so you could just hold it until you’re done auditioning different notes and then it would jump on release. I think the bigger downside to sequencing in a piano roll is note length, it’s much more intuitive to type in a note and it plays indefinitely until you place another note or note off

Ctrl-0, Ctrl-1 will change the edit step. Also you can hit ESC to disable editing and play around on keyboard playing the instruments until happy, hit ESC and punch it in. Keyboard-centrism of Renoise is awesome.

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It’s possible I’ve been doing it badly in other interfaces, but trackers have always been fast for me, once I’ve decided what I want. Type in the notes, done. Certainly faster than sheet music, even in electronic form. I actually find trackers faster than pianoroll, because I keep clicking the wrong note and then having to go back and undo what I did, and fiddling with note length in pianoroll … well, it hasn’t been good.

And you can jam around in renoise, as I said. Go to the sample window, set up a sound or instrument, bang away on your MIDI keyboard. And noodletrap lets you save what you’ve been doing, so it’s even better. I am just faster at expressing myself on a guitar, so that’s what I do. If I were a pianist, I’d have a massive USB keyboard in front of me and do my composing straight in Renoise, using simple sine waves. It just isn’t part of the workflow at which Renoise is particularly efficient, that’s all. If the original poster was trying to compose by guessing and typing in notes, that’s probably not an efficient workflow - that’s what I was trying to point out.

If I work with chords, then transposing or copying and moving them is much easier on a piano roll, compared to the tracker interface. Selecting many notes and editing them together makes things very comfortable I think.

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Ctrl-0, Ctrl-1 will change the edit step. Also you can hit ESC to disable editing and play around on keyboard playing the instruments until happy, hit ESC and punch it in. Keyboard-centrism of Renoise is awesome.

Aware of this, really not what I was talking about as disabling the edit step or record entirely and then re-enabling it is an extra step. What I’m not aware of, maybe missing something important here but…idk why there are two note off keys, so it would be cool if you could just hold caps while auditioning notes and releasing it would trigger the step jump

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is there a way to cause a note event to be in “trigger mode” rather than in “sustain mode”?

what i mean is, sometimes when i draw a note, i want it to be a trigger, not hold the sustain indefinitely.

for instance, a drum sample might not need to be held for infinity. with a ‘trigger mode’, the ADSR of a synth would do its thing with its own release rather than needing to program in note stops.

reason i write this is because when i move patterns, sometimes i get the note hanging problem cause i havent managed to put in the end note, etc.

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reason i write this is because when i move patterns, sometimes i get the note hanging problem cause i havent managed to put in the end note, etc.

You can’t make a sustained note (e.g. a string) stop automagically at pattern boundaries, no.

Personally, when making chord sequences that anyway will get triggered in the next pattern I tend to add a track-wide note off (CTRL/CMD + Caps lock) near the end of the pattern.

What you can do with the instrument, is to assign the sample as a one-shot (sample properties). This will cause it to play through the duration of the sample data, ignoring loop points in the sample and note-offs in the pattern. This is great for drums, and I guess it could be used for shorter sustained sounds too?

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It’s possible I’ve been doing it badly in other interfaces, but trackers have always been fast for me, once I’ve decided what I want. Type in the notes, done. Certainly faster than sheet music, even in electronic form. I actually find trackers faster than pianoroll, because I keep clicking the wrong note and then having to go back and undo what I did, and fiddling with note length in pianoroll … well, it hasn’t been good.

And you can jam around in renoise, as I said. Go to the sample window, set up a sound or instrument, bang away on your MIDI keyboard. And noodletrap lets you save what you’ve been doing, so it’s even better. I am just faster at expressing myself on a guitar, so that’s what I do. If I were a pianist, I’d have a massive USB keyboard in front of me and do my composing straight in Renoise, using simple sine waves. It just isn’t part of the workflow at which Renoise is particularly efficient, that’s all. If the original poster was trying to compose by guessing and typing in notes, that’s probably not an efficient workflow - that’s what I was trying to point out.

This post made me remember how much I miss having my 88 key controller in front of me. Poor thing died on me several months back, very sad. I’ve been living paycheck to paycheck for a while in prep for a move, and I’m moved now, so I’m broke again, but I did finally manage to get a second job that was willing to work around my other job’s hours so combined I have full time work now, which means I should be able to buy a new one soon. But not next paycheck, rent is due then… but in like, a month I can probably do it.

If I work with chords, then transposing or copying and moving them is much easier on a piano roll, compared to the tracker interface. Selecting many notes and editing them together makes things very comfortable I think.

Working with polyphonic instruments in general is kind of a pain in trackers. Just, record some 2 handed piano, just a short simple sequence. Now try to make sense of the pattern you have created. Impossible.

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ANYWAY,

is there a way to play a sample using an ADSR instead of the note off command to dictate when the release portion will come? like a drum trigger mode in the sampler? couldnt there be one button that ignores the noteoff function and treats a sample as though it were being triggered and not sustained?

that could easily be a button in the sampler dialogue somewhere.

photo+33.JPG

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is there a way to play a sample using an ADSR instead of the note off command to dictate when the release portion will come? like a drum trigger mode in the sampler? couldnt there be one button that ignores the noteoff function and treats a sample as though it were being triggered and not sustained?

that could easily be a button in the sampler dialogue somewhere.

If I understand what you mean, I just wouldn’t use the ADSR function. I’d use some of the other functions in combination to provide a release profile.

30

couldnt there be one button that ignores the noteoff function and treats a sample as though it were being triggered and not sustained?

that could easily be a button in the sampler dialogue somewhere.

If you are looking for something that completely ignores the note-off -this would be the one-shot trigger

It’s specified for each individual sample in the instrument and you can still add your own envelopes (sustain/loop will be ignored)

http://tutorials.renoise.com/wiki/Sampler#Sample_Properties

31

Working with polyphonic instruments in general is kind of apain in trackers. Just, record some 2 handed piano, just a short simple sequence. Now try to make sense of the pattern you have created. Impossible.

where is the problem in recording chords and making sense out of the resulting pattern?

do you have problems with the result in regards of timing? have you tried turning on/off quantize and/or recording of note delays?

or are you simply refering to the fact that the notes won’t be sorted ascendingly from left to right, according to their note value?

if it’s the latter, i’m with you - can get quite a mess depending on the complexity of the recorded data, as renoise won’t “sort” the notes by value across the sub-track columns.

32

ok, i found out about the ADSR function way of doing it, simply turn the sustain part all the way down and use the decay as the release, thats one workaround.

also, the trigger functions look really good.

renoise is great software, praises to the devs,

I think aside from the unfamiliarity of new functions that a new user might have with Renoise, today i think the most difficult part is the fact that most of whats going on in a song is invisible at any given time, and it takes a lot of scrolling and or hotkeys to look around for things.

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where is the problem in recording chords and making sense out of the resulting pattern?

do you have problems with the result in regards of timing? have you tried turning on/off quantize and/or recording of note delays?

or are you simply refering to the fact that the notes won’t be sorted ascendingly from left to right, according to their note value?

if it’s the latter, i’m with you - can get quite a mess depending on the complexity of the recorded data, as renoise won’t “sort” the notes by value across the sub-track columns.

It’s mostly the latter. There’s a ledger script that can mostly fix order, but I don’t think it can adjust noteoffs for you too, but even if it could it’s still a pain to have to run a script on every pattern, it’s just more busy work.

I have some issues with recording in Renoise in general, not just recording in patterns, with getting the first note. Renoise doesn’t mute instruments or input during count in, so if you just miss the first transient in a long recording you won’t even know it until you’ve done the entire recording and play it back. With pattern recording, I have issues with the first note ending up at the end of a pattern. But none of these problems have anything to do with being polyphonic.

34

The 1st time I used it I have the same problem as yours but time goes by after I learned from a lot of people here in the forum I was getting inlove with trackers Samples are so easy to chop note per note you can assign different kinds of fx 1 by 1 I guess that’s the reason why I fall inlove with renoise yeah the above comments were true you should know the keyboard shortcuts, it will help you a lot. When I program my drums I always enable metronome and add a little volume and note delay to humanize it.