Layering hits with sliced break

Hoping someone has a good workflow tip to help me.

If I chopped up a break using Recycle, and sent the slices as separate samples to my old Akai S3000XL, layering additional samples with those slices (e.g. some drum machine hits or whatever to beef the break up) was trivial. The same goes for EXS24 in Logic, which took over from my S3000XL.

If I assign a break to a sampler instrument in Renoise, and use the slice function to assign each slice to a different key, I can’t add any more samples to the instrument, so I can’t layer drum hits in the way I am used to doing.

So far, if I have wanted to layer additional hits with a break, I have simply manually entered note data for a second sampler instrument alongside the original break. This seems really long winded, and I’m sure there must be a better way to achieve what I want to do. Simply copying the note data won’t do, as I typically have maybe five drum machine samples which I want to layer with many more than five slices within a break.

If you wanted to layer some drum machine hits with your sliced breaks, how would you go about this?

Load in your break sample and slice it up as usual.

When you’re done, right-click (or command click on Mac) in the sample list and choose ‘Destructively Render Slices’.

The virtual slices are now converted to proper samples instead, which in turn unlocks the sample list and keyzones so that you can continue to add/layer more sounds.

6831 renoise-destructively-render-slices.png

Thanks, that’s really helpful, much appreciated. That should sort me out.
I knew I must have been missing something!