I play bass in a 3 piece band with a guitarist and a drummer. I wanted to play some organ chords live with my feet somehow. I considered getting some midi bass pedals, or similar large midi floor box with a bunch of switches, but cost and size kept me from going down that road. Eventually, the idea just came to me, to use a renoise pattern as a vertical “list” of chords, in the order they are to be played in the song, one chord per line. Then using the “play current line” command connected to a single footswitch, I could play through the chord progression live while playing my bass, tapping the switch on every chord change.
So after setting this up and trying it out, my first thought was ‘wow, this works great!’ I like how simple it is, it has a small footprint on stage, it’s easy to play being just one footswitch, and it’s immensely powerful the more you start playing with using renoise this way. The main drawback is the obvious one, you can’t choose chords on the fly like you could with a more “keyboard” like controller, rather, you’re tied to whatever data you put in the pattern. Also, you need a good debounced switch that doesn’t repeat when held. Since you are merely stepping through a predetermined list of chords, if you fall behind or jump ahead of the band, it can be difficult to recover, and the wrong chord will be playing until you do, so you want to make sure your switch is sending only 1 command per press. Also, there is a limit to how fast you can play stuff with one footswitch, especially if there’s a good amount of latency with your setup.
All that being said, using renoise like this rules, and the more I do it, the better I get at doing more complex things with it. For instance, it started with just organ chords, but pretty soon I was adding melody, adding more instruments, toggling effects, etc, all using pattern note and effects commands. The next big break through was when I figured out that I could use phrases to do automation. So now I can simulate the organ swell pedal by making a a phrase with the volume automation and calling it with the zxx command on the same line as the chord I want it to affect. Now when I trigger that line, the chord swells in over time, even though the curser isn’t moving. I’m also using phrases to play stuff that I can’t physically play fast enough with my foot. For this, I added a second footswitch and attached it to the tap tempo tool so that I can set the bpm that the phrases follow to what the band is playing. It works great, takes some practice though, just like any other musical instrument. I’m also sending note data out of renoise to a midi controller with cv outputs to toggle my bass effects pedals on and off at certain points in the songs, all from the comfort of that one footswitch.
So I ended up with a renoise song where each pattern is a song, and so I didn’t have to fiddle with the computer during the set, I added 2 more foot switches for next/previous pattern, and one more footswitch for stop, in case everything goes sideways and I just need to kill all sound. I ordered the patterns just like our setlist, so once I get the song loaded up, I can play the whole set using only a few foot switches.
So needless to say, I’m very pleased with this setup. I keep finding more and better ways of doing things. It sounds like my band has a keyboard player, and because I’m triggering each individual line, it feels very live. And I’ve seen no mention of anyone else using it quite like this, so that’s why I took the time to write this up. I hope someone finds it useful. Thanks, ya’ll.
Here’s a video demonstrating how it works. This is my band covering Roller by Goblin. We set up some mic’s and recorded this during practice. I went back later and synced the mix to a screen recording of renoise. Every time the curser moves is when I press the footswitch. Its mostly just triggering long church organ chords, but there are some phrases in use here to do volume swells, the organ break, and synth pitchwheel at the end.
