Keep patterns for later / hide section / any tip

Help, Support & Bugs
1

Hi !

As I explained in my introduction topic, I got Renoise less than a week ago and completely felt in love with it.
Actually, the only thing I miss, is my sleep now that I spend my nights making sounds.

In my first track that is pretty advanced, I’m starting to find some flaws in the way I organized my patterns, since I decided to start without even looking at what was possible and go with the flow.
Now, it’s time to find my ideal workflow for my next tracks, or at least the first iteration.

All that to say, that one of my main concern is that I have a tendency at keeping lots of patterns “in memory”, not being actual part of my song.
I just started using sections in the sequencer view, which is a good start making a big separation between the start of my track and my drafts.

For example, when chopping beat, I like to keep a pattern of the original chopped-to-tempo sample on the grid, without any of my modification. I also sometimes have ideas while working on a complete different part of my song that I need to draft, and keep away while I finish what I was doing.

I tried searching the forum and either found weird solutions, nothing or old things that may not be up to date since Renoise seems to have evolved a lot, but here is my question:

I would like to know if there was a way to maybe:

  • save some samples (like instruments) somewhere else than in the sequencer view and just get them when we want
  • if not, maybe we could “collapse” a section to hide its content ? that way I could hide my drafts while working on my track and open it when needed
  • Saving to file could be nice, but a bit messy if I have to save file, delete pattern, load file, …

Also, if you have any tip on how to handle such things that I didn’t think about, let me know, maybe I even completely missed a core feature there.

If there is anything that could do that, or even if the API can do it, I may be able to code a tool myself, but didn’t dig that much in the API specs or Lua yet.

EDIT: also pretty useful to save some complex automations instead of deleting them, in case we would need them later.

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Depending on pattern complexity, phrases saved with instruments may be a useful place to store ideas/drafts. You can also always just mute patterns in the pattern arranger with the return/enter key when it has focus. Keeping them next to or nearby the actual song patterns playing

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Is it easy to drag and drop some patterns from phrases to Sequence ? I may have to look into patterns more, barely used it for now.
About the other method suggested, that won’t “hide” my sequences but just avoid them playing, right ?

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It won’t hide/collapse them visually, but they’ll have a big X through em, so it’s clear they’re not playing

If you write or copy patterns into phrases, you don’t have to copy back to the pattern editor unless you want to, you can just call the phrase data by inputting single notes into the pattern editor to call the phrase. There are several ways this can work. Phrases are really powerful, and everyone should be using them, imo. Tracker within a tracker. Lots of cool possibilities. Read the manual on the phrase section :slight_smile:

The only downside to phrases is that you can’t save automation data within them, but the pattern editor is a good place for automation anyway. FX commands do work inside phrases, though.

Hope this helps!

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Hmm okay I see, it might not resolve the exact problem I was trying to solve since it introduces some other downsides (I most of the time like to see my pattern directly in the sequencer, as well as save automations curves).
Guess I’ll keep my current approach which is having a dedicated Section named « drafts » containing all my drafts, but you might still have opened some new possibilities for me, thanks !

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