There is something about trackers, and Renoise in particular that really appeals to me.
Have actually created bugger all with it yet though
I just have a fantasy of having just Renoise, some VST plugins and Reason 4 (and maybe Orion) on a laptop & creating some awesome electronica.
Now v2 has arrived I’m determined to really get to grips with this & actually start creating some compositions (rather than half-hearted doodlings & unfinished loops/tracks …)
I’ve had a Renoise license since 1.5, but to be honest, I used it for a month or so before deciding trackers probably just weren’t for me. Couldn’t get my head around programming every note, using pattern effect commands, learning keyboard shortcuts, the Speed thing, found it really hard to break out of 4/4 time…
Then I got an email that the 2.0 beta was out. I hadn’t produced anything very much for a good few months, so I thought I’d give it a try.
Wow. Awesome.
I have no idea what features were added when, but everything just works together so well now. I can record, edit and sequence samples in the same program, which frankly makes me moist. And however decided to go to normal BPM settings deserves a medal.
Trackers aren’t an easy thing to pick up when you’ve spent your life staring at piano rolls, and Renoise I don’t think makes that any easier, but the program is so loaded with handy features and just such a joy to work with now, you actually want to learn it inside out, to get the most of it.
Yesss… I had the exact mirror of that problem for years… grown on trackers I was never capable of learning other sequencers’ logics, and I still find it very hard and time expensive to edit notes with the mouse on a piano roll.
With the job, life routines and the other things, music creation had come to a end for more than a decade, for me.
Its no more the same, thanks to Renoise developers and community
i grew in fasttracker then had my reason period for about 4 years so i was using both for decent amount of time , prefer trackers of course, but there are definitely advantages in piano roll-ed sequencers, especially when it comes to moving big blocks of notes, or working on a bigger time frame … yet i love renoise and it’s growing to be better and better with every new version
The Nudge function is currently not really interesting even though you can nudge notes in whole patterns or songs completely down, the notes do not transit to the following patterns in the sequencer (which is not really possible either if you use one pattern multiple times in a row) and even get lost.
It would be handy if Renoise would in that case offer you the opportunity to perform a “Make pattern sequence order unique” and give each sequencer position a unique pattern, then the nudging functionality gives Renoise a Piano-roll user the same power as he/she has with a pianoroll editor.
But you can still use trickery of adding empty patterns and removing patterns in between existing pattern sequences regarding “shifting” large portions of notes. In that you can add minory additions if you need that or cut portions of patterns to new patterns and replace the last end with a different section that you want.
The workflow is complete different in contrast to a piano roll and you extend or making songs smaller by concentrating your focus pattern-wise instead of dragging around whole songs.
yup but Nudge function is not exactly what I had in mind, it’s not just simple moving of few notes that is nice to have in pianoroll enviroment, but you can have say piano part written, where you have chords in lower keys and melody on top, you can select multiple notes and transpose them, if some of the notes are harmonically incorrect you can just select that line and move it by semitone etc…
of course you can partly do that in renoise too, if you select a row and transpose it either via shortcut or advanced edit, i personally would like to have both worlds together, for micro editing in tracker mode and macro editing of piano roll
but this brought me an idea, would be nice if you could “sort notes by pitch” via advanced edit - this is what it would do… if you have chords like
C-5 E-4 A-4
G-4 E-5 C-5
D-5 A-4 F-5
it would turn it into…
E-4 A-4 C-5
G-4 C-5 E-5
A-4 D-5 F-5
then it would be easier to just select a row and edit imo - still it’s not the same thing
That is true… if Renoise would register chords in this manner during recording automatically, it would save you a conversion-step.
Scriptwise, a sorting-function that performs this on the clipboard data is possible (as it is only xml data)
I love how I can hear something in my head and type it out then and there. Instead of using the mouse, cutting and pasting, and having to spend so much time making a simple beat using samples. tracking gets the job done and renoise makes it sound good.
renoise rock!
For me it’s a total no-brainer that I wouldn’t be making music at this rate if it wasn’t for Renoise. Just like I wouldn’t have gotten into photography if someone hadn’t convinced to lend me money for a DSLR when my crappy digicam broke. I don’t even play an instrument… just Renoise. The Amiga musicians who made me wanna look at tunes in protracker, Starbreeze Studios (FT2) and the Renoise team are solely responsible for my musicality… it’s just not possible to sum that up with “thanks”.
We all know that the Amiga version of OctaMed currently still rocks them all (Including Renoise) MIDI-wise…
I think this is more an insult to the current programmer of MED than flamewar worthy on a Renoise board
