Another dark drill beat, ahh what the heck I exclusively use Renoise anyway
Subscribe to my yt if you’re interested in hearing trap, drill and reggaeton made in renoise. Just started my channel yesterday
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Having never needed any plugins, I can easily share to this thread. Be gentile though. This first one is a work in progress. It only uses 5 unique blocks in the whole song so far! The synths are self-made from basic waveforms and filters. The drums are selected from samples that came with Renoise.
HozannaShout6.xrns (1.5 MB)
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This next one was my first attempt at automation using a modified drumkit that came with Renoise. Unfortunately that drumkit by itself is bigger than the upload size here on the forum so I had to post the file externally. Other than the modern sound, the lyrics (listed in the box) and melody are a 90 year old hymn! 
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Wow, I’ve never seen someone using a default pattern length of 32. Have you just started making music? These two musical pieces are nice approaches. Of course I assume that these pieces aren’t finished yet (as you said, WIP for the first one), because on one hand they are way too short to be called “songs” and on the other hand there are only a couple of basic instruments and it sounds pretty empty overall. It sounds like Amiga music made for any sort of small intro. You’re using Renoise now, so don’t be shy and use its possibilities, you don’t have to limit yourself to a couple of tracks and instruments. You can use as much tracks and instruments as you need. Just take advantage of it and fill the gaps. And your music would also benefit from working on the mix, especially in terms of the first piece. 
I’ve never recorded a piece professionally, but the first one, “Hozanna Shout”, I started out stretching the capabilities of my brand new Amiga 1200 back in 1993. I never wrote lyrics for it which is why I don’t have any verses for it. It also lacks a melody as a result.
The second one, “This World is Not My Home”, has 4 total verses worth of lyrics and the chorus after each. It’s an old hymn from the 1930s remixed for the present time.
Both of them include synths that I invented myself from simple C64-style primitive waveforms and filters. (Yes I’m that old. I had a C64 and later a C128 until I graduated high school.)
Thanks. I’ll need to work on some more synths then.
Yes. The second piece was originally in 4-part harmony and has lyrics to go with it. The first piece, not even a melody nor lyrics. It really needs both.
So you used samples that you have created on C64? And no worries, I’m “that old”, too. I first played on Atari 2600 until I got a C64 at the age of 9 and a couple of years later I started making music on Amiga 500.
Actually, no. I started with a square wave, a sawtooth wave, and a triangle wave and fed them all through various filters so they wouldn’t sound like a chiptune but in truth, apart from the drum and cymbal samples, the first piece is really a chiptune. I used the same techniques for synthesis as I learned on my SID chip enabled 8-bit computers. I used the C128 long enough to get the feel for it. (The C64 had a bad power supply so the sound didn’t work on it.)
The A500 was a whole different ballgame with chord samples and drum loops. There were just so many ways you could “cheat” by using sample tricks to make up for the 4 voice limit.
The reason for the short blocks
I forgot to mention why I use short blocks most of the time. The fact that I can reuse the blocks many times reduces my editing time when making a song.
The first piece uses only 5 unique blocks but deactivates some of the tracks in each block during the intro, adds a few more afterwards and when it gets past the bridge that disables the drums and needs a verse before and after, it has cymbals and drums in the outro added in with all of the tracks active at once. The loop follows a pattern using the following blocks 0, 1, 0 again, then 2. The cymbal in the rest drop near the end has a block to itself and the quick, final note at the end have blocks to themselves. Blocks 3 and 4 are the exception, not the rule in my songs. Usually either the blocks or the tracks within the blocks are reused extensively like blocks 0, 1 and 2.
In the second piece, I reused the entire intro as the outro without needing to enter a single note for them. Yes, I reused all the blocks there too. Since the melody uses different rhythms for each verse, I used track-aliases for all the non-melody parts. It makes the editing easier there too.
I learned the block reuse techniques on Amiga’s MED, later OctaMED, OctaMED SoundStudio, MilkyTracker on Amiga, Linux and Mac, ProTrekr on Linux and finally Renoise on Linux. (I don’t often do Windows.)
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You’re talking about patterns when you’re talking about “blocks”, right? Or are you talking about tracks?
Yes, preferably merging samples (kick + snare and so on) and creating loops out of patterns, In theory you could get 16-20 tracks out of 4, but everything has a price, and in this case the price was a significant limitation in terms of variation regarding composition and transitions (furthermore a loop of a whole pattern of 4 tracks needs a lot of RAM, which is bad if you only got 512 KB or 1 MB like on Amiga). For the same reason I don’t use the technique you’re describing above (mute tracks), another reason is the lack of overview. And I don’t think you save a noteworthy amount of time in comparison to duplicating patterns (that’s what I do) and change the editing of notes etc. afterwards to gain variation. The good news is that Renoise supports several ways to work and you can work the way you like. 
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Yes, patterns. Though I use track aliases also when I need the melody to vary from the first verse.
Agreed! My background is in programming and the DRY concept (DRY=don’t repeat yourself) helps me to keep all my mistakes to a minimum because I only have to fix them in one place.
That might be the best thing about Renoise I have a pretty wacky setup myself
Getting used to the glide command. Finally!!!
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All renoise sound design and synthesis using native dsp & tools
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i make all my trax with renoise 3.2.1 and i never use plugins cause i hate em. also running linux
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fun track 
hope you don’t mind me re-shuffling the original into this?
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I wouldn’t have uploaded the source if I was posessive about it 
And I love what you made with i! And so quick haha.
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Great production, but sadly I don´t like the style at all 
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God stuff man great mix also
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re-shuffled your .xrns into this for funs ;
Hope it isn’t blasphemy, uses some vst now
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I’m glad you had fun with it! It’s certainly not blasphemy to add the same lyrics in a different way! 
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