I’ve had the Renoise demo for about a couple of months now, and am not really getting anywhere with it. That note entering lag, not that I’m complaining, is bothersome.
I’m pretty new at the whole tracker thing, some of you here may have had experience with the amiga and early pc trackers.
I was just wondering how long it took you guys to master Renoise, so that you were making songs the exact way you imagined them to be?
I’ve been using trackers for 10 years now and still have much to learn 
seriously, probably I’ve learnt everything which was possible on FastTracker2; I’ve really pushed it to the last, extreme, bounding, razor edge envelope:
each feature, each cheat, each bug, each hidden command…
but still I feel there is A LOT to learn for me regarding ReNoise and VSTi integration.
And as soon as some features will be added (MIDI send to VST and VST multitimbrality, for example), there will be even more.
I’m making progresses in big steps, and what I’m doing now with ReNoise is without any doubt absolutely superior to everything I’ve done before on FastTracker, but still there is a lot to explore.
Starting with ReNoise as your first tracker is a double-shaped weapon:
it gives you much more power, but it is much more complex than FastTracker,
So keep up your interest in trackers, they can give you fun and great feelings for years.
The best advice I can give is to stick at it like IT Alien said it is worth it. I wouldn`t give up/ be too disheartened because of the lag issue (even though it can be frustrating, and a fix is high on my wishlist!) as there is a lot more to the programme has to offer.
A good way to learn is from other people i.e. going over other peoples rns`s
either beatbattle:
or rns`s people have posted on the songs page
I found also (if your very new to tracking/ music) that a quick way to learn about beats is to place a beat wav you like in one track, get it in time and try and recreate that beat from one shot samples in tracks next to it. It can be good sometimes to use one shots (i.e. bass drums/snares) from the original wav to see if you can emulate the beat exactly. Sometimes you will have to change the lines per beat or create speed alternations for each line etc. which all helps you learn about tracking.
Hope some of this helps, I started in 95 (amiga) and have only recently moved onto PC + renoise so am still learning a lot myself about the program + still improving but it is like learning an instrument: takes a lot of practice but very rewarding when you improve!
same here. I´m tracking for 8 years now ´til I discovered Renoise (last year) and still haven´t found out about all features like this nice VST-Tech.
I also do it that way as Ledger already said, to grab a well composed *.rns and study it. (Watching the basslines, the effecthandling the composer have blablablub…) This is how you really gettin good - Learn from each other 
Tracking on my 7th year now, still not good enough. 
My prob is I’m lazy and give up when I don’t get the correct mood right away, and that’s something you should NOT do! I know my way around trackers quite well now, used to zap other people’s songs and work around the mood they set to make my own song. This is a nice way to do it in the beginning, as there is a myriad of samples and now VSTi’s laying around, making you easily confused on where to begin.
Make some crap songs first, just learning, don’t spread too much (unless you use some strange handle no-one will recognise… 
, and ask the good tracker-folks for advice.