Important for Renoise-Redux integration: working with drums!

fladd · August 22, 2015, 7:24pm

Wasn’t sure where to put this, so I made a new topic:

I assume that Renoise 3.1 will also get named note columns per track, such as Redux. It would be great if you could consider to make it possible to lock certain notes (or ranges of notes) to those columns (in a similar way to what you do with MIDI inputs, where certain note ranges can be locked to a single track) during recording.

I think this will be especially important for a tight integration with Redux when it comes to drums. Let me explain why:

People should be able to record their drums with Renoise (since recording is not possible with Redux), and then take this sequencer “recording” seamlessly into another DAW via Redux. After all, this seems to be the main idea of Redux.

When recording drums, it is absolutely indispensable to record each drum into its own track in order to mix the whole drumset later properly. Now, while this is possible in Renoise (at least when using MIDI input devices, see above), it is not easy to move those multiple track then into a single phrase, in order to use it in Redux.

My suggestion above, to also allow to record into seperate note columns would make it easier to convert the whole drumkit recording into Redux (in which we then can still route different notes to different outputs, and thus keep the mixability).

Most importantly, please note that I am talking about recording actually played drums here (i.e. press ESC and then play, and then play your drums to the song using either the computer keyboard or any MIDI input device, such that the notes get recorded into the sequencer), and NOT about simply programming them manually in the sequencer.

Please also consider this MPC-style way of creating drums when finalizing Renoise 3.1 and its integration with Redux. I think those two programmes together could be very powerful tools in such a workflow, and having this covered properly can potentially bring a lot of new users (people who are used to performance samplers such as the MPC).

gova · August 22, 2015, 9:19pm

I think you should say that you mean recording of MIDI data that triggers drum samples that you recorded, if that’s what you meant, as recording of samples is possible in redux.

fladd · August 23, 2015, 8:51pm

Well sequencer data, not necessarily MIDI data (could be samples, too, not only VSTi). I actually thought I was quite clear on that.Turns out I wasn’t Thanks for making that clear.

Ledger · September 18, 2015, 12:49pm

Sounds like a good idea to me!

ffx · September 19, 2015, 9:10am

Ok, how would be a practical solution for this?

Maybe an switch for each keyzone “separate to columns” ?

fladd · October 10, 2015, 3:32pm

I think the easiest solution would simply be to allow MIDI devices to be set up to, instead of record into a predefined track, to record into a predefined column in a predefined track. The problems that come with this are obviously situations in which the polyphony is > 1.

Another option would be to have the possibility to collapse the content of several tracks into a single track (basically the opposite of what my tool currently does). This can then be transformed into a phrase.

To be honest, I don’t have a universal solution for this problem. I don’t even know if there is one

I have to see whether a tool that always runs in the background and rearranges notes on the fly could be feasible. In that case, you would first set the note value to column bindings in the tool and then just record. Whenever a note is recorded into whatever free column, the tool would put it into the correct column (if possible).

danoise · October 10, 2015, 7:13pm

I have to see whether a tool that always runs in the background and rearranges notes on the fly could be feasible.

Perhaps you know about this one? Doesn’t run the background, but good enough for my own use:

https://forum.renoise.com/t/new-tool-2-8-3-1-reorder-notes-by-pitch/39315

Ledger · October 10, 2015, 7:30pm

Perhaps you know about this one? Doesn’t run the background, but good enough for my own use:

https://forum.renoise.com/t/new-tool-2-8-3-1-reorder-notes-by-pitch/39315

Keep meaning to integrate that into the tool. on the todo list…

fladd · October 10, 2015, 8:24pm

Perhaps you know about this one? Doesn’t run the background, but good enough for my own use:

https://forum.renoise.com/t/new-tool-2-8-3-1-reorder-notes-by-pitch/39315

Thanks, I’ll have a look at it. A native solution would be nicer, though I think.

fladd · October 11, 2015, 2:25pm

Another idea that would help tremendously when working with drums:

Idea: Expand instrument routing

danoise · October 12, 2015, 2:19pm

Keep meaning to integrate that into the tool. on the todo list…

From a user perspective, it’s just a different sorting option.

That’s also the reason I didn’t release an alternative version of your tool - they would be “too similar”

But internally, it’s quite different - doing a two-pass: first figuring out the notes, and then sorting.

So if you’re going to merge them, you should probably keep the sorting segments totally apart.

Ledger · October 12, 2015, 4:15pm

From a user perspective, it’s just a different sorting option.

That’s also the reason I didn’t release an alternative version of your tool - they would be “too similar”

But internally, it’s quite different - doing a two-pass: first figuring out the notes, and then sorting.

So if you’re going to merge them, you should probably keep the sorting segments totally apart.

Sounds like just attaching different functions to different popup entries, at least in the basic sense.

No doubt I will have to do some updates of stuff for 3.1, so should get round to this and some other feature requests on older tools then.

Ill fire you a PM or something if I run into any problems if thats ok?

satobox · November 17, 2015, 3:26am

Today, I was going to post a new topic, but I find this topic by searching forum.
It seems that the fladd’s request is just the same as mine, so I post 1 idea here.

##################################

Smart Drumkit recording (note input method)

Now on Renoise 3.1 beta, we can route each audio output of each part of a Drumkit instrument (i.e. kick, snare, hihat, etc) to any track individually. Thanks for the effort for it, devs.

But still, we cannot record note-data of drumkit into the Pattern Editor smartly, we only can record note-data of all parts of drumkit by the mixed-up ugly way or do separate recordings for each part.
So, Renoise beginner’s tutorial always will be like; “First, let’s record kick drum, second is snare, next is hihat, etc”. I understand it’s the Tracker style, but only such way, the meaning of the drumkit which we made with much effort fades away a bit.

Well, seeing the Pattern Editor of R3.1, I just thought a simple solution for recording drumkit, though I’m not a programmer and I don’t know whether it can be programed or not.

But anyhow, let me show one idea here.

##################################

When doing recording drumkit by using MIDI-pad or MIDI-key (regardless of real-time or step recording);

if the 1st column is named as “C-3”, the column will be C-3 exclusive input, and the notes besides that are flicked (and inputted) to the next columns automatically.

6323

if the 1st column is named as “C-3” and the 2nd column is named as “D-3, E-3”, the 1st column will be “C-3” exclusive input and 2nd column will be “D-3 & E-3” exclusive input, and the notes besides that are flicked (and inputted) to the next columns as well.

6324

That is, when recording drumkit, Renoise reads the note name from the column name first, then sorts out the note data from the input MIDI signal and distributes them to the appropriate column. And once the recording is finished, we can treat all inputted note data as the same as normal track data.

##################################

Well, probably I think that there were similar ideas more in this forum already (something like “column-lock”) and I never persist only in my idea, actually just we want a smarter way than now.