How Do You Write Lead Lines For Midi Instruments

Help, Support & Bugs
41

Nah. :( I tried that, for almost an hour I tried to do some pitches glides to a lead line, but I just cannot use that envelope thing. I don’t have it in me. I would really like to see a reasonable hand-drawn melody pitch control line done with that thing. Renoise’s automation envelope editor is the Wrong Tool ™ for me for “writing” anything. It’s about as useful as… trying to write a song with mixing console automation. Automation is for automation. Pitch control in a melody line is not automation, it’s an essential part of the “soloist performance”, just like notes.

There may be other, useful pitch related uses for it. After deciding that it’s a failed attempt, I made this instead

I think that’s something that wouldn’t be easily expressed in terms of ProTracker commands and notes. But is it musically interesting, that’s another thing.

So far it seems to me that expressing timing, velocity and length related things is great in Renoise. But expressing pitch… not so much.

By the way, AAS Ultra Analog VA-1 doesn’t seem to be working 100% in Renoise. None of the drop-down menu commands work. The menus do pop up, and I can click on the menu items, but then nothing happens. It’s the same with both AU and VST versions. Mac OS X 10.6.7, newest demo version of Renoise.

42

Pitch bend, as in “when I play my keyboard, each note I play is affected by the overall pitch-bend amount”. The amount of pitch-bend is equal to the position of the wheel.
Sample-based instruments, on the other hand, always trigger at their initial pitch value, and only then will they accept pitch commands. There is no “wheel” to set the absolute pitch of an sample-based instrument, no state to remember.

So I’m basically saying that these are two different concepts:
Sample based instruments = pitch commands describe the motion of the wheel (relative)
Plugins = pitch bend describe the position of the wheel (absolute).

And that improvements to the pitch concept could go both ways:
Sample based instruments could have a global tuning (absolute tuning ), as discussed in this thread
And plugins which already have absolute tuning could get relative tuning (but the missing standards would make it less than ideal)

Because this stuff is both simple and complicated?

43

Did you check if your synth can be put into monophonic mode and use portamento? Just in case you don’t know this, many VSTi and hardware synths allow you to play in mono mode and when you hold a second key down it can pitch slide to this note. I think this is the best option if it’s possible.

44

Yes, I know this. :) But thanks for bringing that up. Portamentos can be done like that, and it’s a different way of playing. Tracker commands 1xx, 2xx, 5xx is a different “language”, with different expressivity, and it’s really that expressivity that I’m looking after. With the tracker command language, there’s a different set of things that are easy to “say”, so to speak.

Using a mono sound and legato glides is entirely possible, and depending on the synth, the legato speed can even be controlled “on the fly” with a suitable parameter with MIDI commands in the pattern.

What I’m really trying to say is that in my thinking: the notes and commands in a pattern are a description of a musical performance. It’s something that’s not played/recorded but written, like I’m writing this text here. Anything that’s outside the patterns is… polishing, mixing, coloring, something.

Also, this kind of stuff is not possible with mono legato sounds: (recorded it in Live)

I think that kind of style used to be very common in ProTracker/FastTracker, because you could just bend an entire chord sample. Why I’m not satisfied with just Live then - because it’s a different thing. I played that in, and it sounds like it was played live. What’s played live, is a different kind of animal than what’s typed in on the computer keyboard. When I’m using a tracker, I’m in a “tracker mindset” and in that world, different things are possible, and I write different stuff than elsewhere. When playing live, my improvisation is all over the place, a tidal wave that’s hard to control and fills everything. But in trackers I’m able to tame down that force into a nice and usable waterhose! And if I need to use the mouse at all (let alone in a differently oriented, separate place that’s not part of the notes), the whole stream of water is blocked completely. YMMV. I don’t know if this makes sense to anybody else.

Once more, thanks everybody, in this thread I’ve already learned a lot about Renoise, and certainly opened up my thinking. I’ll probably buy Renoise at some point.

45

Maybe I’d better sum up to solutions that will probably work the best for me, in the current version of Renoise

  1. Render the lead sound to a multisample and do it like '92. Not ideal, but on the other hand, it’s a familiar and clean model to work with. For many types of sounds it’ll be just fine. This will also work polyphonically.
  2. Use a mono gliding lead sound in the MIDI synth, and control legato/staccato with note lengths, and control glide speed with MIDI CCs.
46

Yeah groovy sound you’ve got there. I like that kind of pitchbending and vibrating stuff too :)

47

Ok, I just had to buy it right away. After seeing the sample renderer… awesome stuff. Though immediately after trying it in the reg version, I stumbled into many other questions like how to get pitch bend for sample instruments working from live MIDI input… Aaargh, at this point I must just stop exploring all sorts of features and just write music for awhile. After a few songs I’ll have a better understanding of the relevance of all these various things.

48

Yeah - hmm well, it is important to make your music sound like you want and imagine, some of this old school gliding/vibrato stuff is definitely not an easy task for many synths, so choose them carefully. I stopped using glides and vibrato for my leads years ago even though I love it, but I’m too lazy as I care more for the raw melody and I’m not that serious about my music yet, so it’s too bad we have to work hard to achieve this sound but that’s life - and I’m not complaining by the way - I had to wait YEARS between the old trackers and until Renoise came along… at least I got rid of my fucking hardware crap and Cubase 1.0, that was really too cumbersome in the long run. GL :)