So I’m making some hip-hop beats for a friend, which was incredibly fun. Renoise is this shit when it comes to sample-based music.
However, once I got done recording their vocals into Renoise, I realized that it’s not as easy as it is in normal DAWs, because I can’t easily move things around and quickly chop and reorder parts of a 6 minutes recording.
I can think of a couple of ways around this:
Purchase Redux, export every instrument intro an xrni file and load it into Redux in another DAW. I’m not using more than, say, 10 instruments in a beat, so this is feasible and the solution I like the most so far
Sync Renoise with the other DAW, so their playheads move together. Vocals are edited in the other DAW and the beat exists in Renoise, and both of them play at the same time. I can’t make it work with Ardour but I may not be trying hard enough
Export the beat as a plain audio file and load it into the other DAW. This one is my least favorite but may be the most comfortable
So, my friends here who regularly work with singers, what’s your workflow?
I am laying down vocals in Melodyne which runs as a plugin inside Renoise track like a charm. It enables me to chop, move around and cut on the standard timeline which syncs with Renoise. I can then apply other effects like comp/eq/stereo widening/reverb and delay.
I think the other approach would be to lay down everything in Ableton or Garageband or similar and then export as wav stems.
That sounds like a great solution. Are you using the full-blown version or the Essential one? I got a bit turned off by the 700$ price tag, but 100$ seems more manageable. Seems like they also got microtonal scales which is great for me
Set up Reaper to loop over the parts where I am doing vocals.
Do a thousand takes : )
When done, explode the repeated takes into separate tracks
Figure out which takes are the best (sometimes splicing different parts into one take)
Maybe do some light compression/limiting/automation to fix up the final take
Export the final vocal take and import into Renoise
I have some custom Reaper scripts that will manage muting/unmuting tracks that works with OSC to make it easier for me to toggle different takes when doing the comps.
It’s been a while since I’ve used vocals in a song, but I always used method 3. I’ve made the music entirely in Renoise, afterwards I’ve rendered the song and loaded the wav file into another program called CoolEdit Pro. Then I’ve recorded the vocals and added them to the music in CoolEdit Pro. I don’t think Renoise is best for vocal stuff because vocal recordings are usually damn long and need a lot of RAM, furthermore there’s no PROPER way to get them in the right positions regarding the timeline (we’re talking about centiseconds), but maybe the method @hexy mentioned is worth a try if you’re willing to spend extra 100 €.
I don’t work with vocals much, but I have done some music with vocals entirely within renoise. I just chop the vocals into reasonable chunks within one or more xrni, then sequence them to tighten up timings, etc. I like working with chops because they’re flexible, inspire creative approaches to vox as just another sonic element, and they invite the use of fx and other fun audio tweakery more so than vocal “tracks”
One more for #3. For me it is a lot easier and cleaner. Renoise is not great nor intuitive when it comes to long samples and traditional tracking, so which ever method one uses, it is going to require some work and lots of management. Method #3 is what I am willing to put up with the most.
Logic and Renoise is my current combo, I think traditional timeline recording still has a place, a DAW can give you great control over sound design before you import any file, R’s waveforms functions are still very useful, but there’s lacking in things like crossfading between chops and the only way to do ‘‘comping’’ would be using phrases and SXX/slicing I guess, timestretching (texture) is experimental, Some also say Bitwig
hi so when you record in melodyne , how do you record to the metronome beat or is that set up ? can you record guitar this way also ? and can you do it without adding pitch correction ? as that would be weird on acoustic guitar lol cheers
i wanted to know if you can record in the sampler to the metronome or along to a beat / song playing in the sequencer cheers
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