For the future, please, if you don’t intend on putting any kinds of options that make actual musicwriting easier, just say it, just tell people “We are focusing on production, not musicwriting. The basics for musicwriting are already as good as they can be in a tracker, so we don’t think it needs improvements, so we’re giving you incredible options for making your production hot and fresh.” which, let me be clear–you’ve added AMAZING options for making a better production. Absolutely AMAZING. I do NOT want to discount these things. Those options are awesome. But they don’t help people like me at all.
Please just be blunt about it. Please don’t trail people along for 10 years. Please don’t do it. Don’t make it sound like you’re eventually going to add something into the program if you find the idea of it to be the antithesis of the basis of your ideas of what the program is supposed to be.
It is absolutely clear at this point that the programmers have no intention of making Renoise easier for those who make music other than EDM. That is absolutely certain at this juncture.
I understand that some people think that EDM is the only kind of “worth while” music to make on a computer, but I’ll beg to differ.
There are some people who are like programmers. These people adapt well to this stuff well, like IT Alien, he’s fantastic. I was floored when I saw how his songs flow when they’re actually being played. I could never have the patience to do that kind of extreme programming. My jaw drops when I see his stuff in action, completely amazing. I don’t look at music like programming, I look at it as patterns, pitch, and tempo.
I am not a programmer, I’m an artist, I’m a musician, I have ideas, I can play the ideas live, I can do very basic programming, but that’s my level of things. I love doing odd timings, multiple timings, 13/8, 7/8, 5/8, etc, I love complex chord progressions, I love unusual progressions.
I wanted Renoise to become EASIER to use for the type of music I make, easier to focus on the musicality of creating a song… but every few versions it seems to be harder and harder to make the type of music I make, until there’s finally this monstrosity called V3 that pretty much ensures that the knowledge of music theory, and musical terminology, and how a real studio is laid out, and how real equipment works, and the musical flow of a song and knowing exactly what it’s musically doing and all the different patterns that are occurring, is utterly useless, it never became a benefit any more than earlier versions; in fact, it became less and less relevant, and it’s the EDM mindset, where the actual musical material isn’t important, it’s how you produce it that’s important.
Renoise has become an amazing powerhouse as far as production. Amazing stuff. But it has done nothing to help someone write the music. The ACTUAL music, the meat and potatoes of a song. The stuff that you could arrange it another way (musical arrangement, not pattern arrangement, something most of the people on this forum don’t even know the definition of as has been proven in the past) like arranged for guitar or something, and it still sounds like something decent.
Much of the music people make in Renoise could simply not be arranged for other instruments and sound pleasurable. In many cases, if it was arranged for a guitar, and it was kept close to the original intent, it would be someone strumming the same way and with the same chord for 10 minutes, maybe strumming a little quieter sometimes than other times. But really, the song would have to be completely changed to be interesting if arranged for other instruments. The kind of songwriting that can be arranged to other instruments is the kind of songwriting that I’m talking about making here, and there has been nothing done in Renoise in 10 years to make that kind of writing easier.
I understand now that people like myself who don’t write EDM were never in your sights in the first place. I just wish you would have been honest about it 10 years ago and I wouldn’t have kept up the kind of hope that I have had, just to have it dashed horribly again in ways beyond what I ever thought you would. I trusted you because you made it sound like I was part of your audience, part of the demographics you were going for. I was not, not even close.
A very saddened, disgruntled Renoise user,
Kizzume
Yes, the “chord” mode is now specified per instrument, which is far better IMHO - but it would seem that we forgot to add a keyboard shortcut.
