The way I have used Renoise all these years has been cheating. I’ve tried to use it like I did MED Soundstudio. There are a number of options that have been pretty much destroyed over the years as new versions of Renoise have come out. I can’t enter notes live because of the changes that were made–the new quantize modes and the inability to simply turn off note delays without using a quantize mode guarantees that notes can never be entered accurately. I’ve worked for 2 hours trying to enter a simple line over and over again, just trying to see if I could figure out the way Renoise wants me to do it, but with no results. I also can’t write by ear because there’s no “play notes while scrolling” option that I’ve been requesting for 10 years that would act like hitting the enter key at any point when scrolling through a pattern, up or down. I also can’t add any new notes to a song once I’ve had to expand a pattern because step length doesn’t affect the cursor keys, so entering notes in any way shape or form becomes impossible once a pattern has been expanded too much. There’s also the chord modes that have been decimated where I constantly have to turn chord mode on and off just to enter something.
So, I can’t really make much in Renoise that doesn’t just sound like a cheap midi file like most of my songs have sounded like, where the tracks are never expanded enough to sound human, and there are never any pitch bends, and there are never really the things that makes a song have decent production values. Other people seem to have the patience to do all the things that need to be done–they don’t mind having to go to several screens and several different modes to do something that I’m used to being all on the same screen. I simply DON’T have the patience and I never really have. It’s been 10 years and I still haven’t really learned Renoise, and I still can’t adjust to the idea of composing via what I see on the screen instead of by ear. I just want my stuff to sound better, but I literally can’t do it because of all these options that are either missing or have been destroyed by new versions.
So, I’d really like to make some basic song ideas, the notes, the chords, the timings, what the placements of the rhythms are, and then once I have the general layout of the song made, I can give it to someone or more than one person where they could work on it from there and maybe turn it into something halfway decent.
I’m not a good electronic music producer, I never have been. I write good music, theory-wise, but that doesn’t mean much in the electronic music world that relies so heavily on production values which I don’t possess and I don’t think I ever have. I can analyze these things about production values, but creating them just isn’t my thing. I’m great in a studio when it comes to recording real instruments, getting everything equalized right, getting all the mics placed right, getting all the levels right, getting all the effects just right, I do ProTools pretty good (but unfortunately I can’t use it because I no longer have hardware that it supports) but electronic production I quite frankly suck at.
So–if anyone is interested in working with me on something, let me know. I’m tired of being stagnant, and I’m tired of not writing anything because I can’t come to my own impossible production standards that I don’t even know how to create.
Thanks.
