I am experimenting with using one instrument for an entire song.
beats phrases on octave 0
basslines on octave 1
melodies on octave 2
chord progressions on octave 3
fx on octave 4
If I can easily transpose notes, and play more than one note at a time, then I can fit more samples on an instrument. As things are now, if I want a bass sound that I can play over two octaves then I need to spread it over 2 octaves on the sampler.
shrug just trying to use renoise in a way that feels powerful and makes sense to me. I love the idea of having my entire song in a single instrument, with the parts broken up into phrases. It keeps things simple and self-contained, and lets me remix songs easily by using the beats from one song and the bassline from another, for example. I have the different samples routed to fx chains w/ outputs set to different channels on my interface.
But how many phrases or varieties of those do you really need for a song? Isn’t 120 enough?
You could give every key its own phrase or varieties of the phrase, at different pitches, basenotes or whatever you want, to make the keys each its own building block for the track. You get to have 120 different ones, but if you still need to transpose a phrase at some point, then you could use the --E00 to reset the envelope and the --GFF (stacked if more than 16 semitones).
This way you wouldn’t need to use up 2 whole octaves for a single bass phrase if you only need it tuned to, lets say, C2, C#2, G2 and C3. You would only need 4 out of 120 keys if you map the 4 keys to the right basenote.
I think i’ll try this myself, could be fun to play with a song in an instrument with my MIDI keyboard.
1 thing you have to remember is that the polyphony is limited to 12 in a single instrument, so if you’re using a lot of chords and overlapping samples you’ll probably end up with sounds disappearing.