Live Mode From The Pov Of A Hardware Sequencer User

Ideas & suggestions
1

this topic has been worth reading, and I would like to extend on the subject. But to keep things clear, I’m opening a new topic here.

From my point of view, playing live is based on

  • muting/unmuting tracks (already there)
  • turning knobs (already there)
  • switching patterns
  • altering sequences at runtime (already there, kind of)

Obviously, Renoise’s default behaviour with patterns is what is labeled as “song mode” on hardware sequencers, as opposed to “pattern mode”. Well, coming from the “hardware world”, what I’m going to present is definitely inspired by it.

So, a pattern mode would need :

  1. loop mode : the current pattern loops until you explicitely switch to another. As a side-effect of this function, this could allow us to move to another pattern and edit it while the other is still running.
  2. binding patterns to the keyboard : by pressing one key, you can explicitely switch to another pattern when the current pattern is done

Actually, those two features could be totally independent. You could use the pattern mode without the loop mode, which would allow you to manually switch from one point in a song to another one.

The pattern mode could simply bind your keyboard to launching patterns rather than playing the currently selected instrument. If the switch between the two modes is easily accessible, it could be a simple and efficient workflow.

The bindings I see :

  1. press a key and the corresponding pattern is queued (somewhat highlighted in the left pane)
  2. to cancel, press the same key again
  3. to correct, press the another key and the queued pattern will be the new one

Mega-bonus

shift + key allows you to do a “instant switch”. The new patterns starts now, from its begining, resetting the MIDI clock. What’s the point of this, you may ask. After all, it would make ugly transitions, and that is not what we want.

Well, I saw a guy once playing breakcore live with a RS7000. Apparently, he had several patterns assigned to the keys, and when he pressed one key he directly switched from one to the other, which would give him a lot more power to make breaks. What was interesting is that the “button pressed event” was somehow quantized, and keeping the button pressed would keep restarting the pattern until he took his finger off. Thanks to that he was able to do some "k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-ka-bom :w00t:" if you see what I mean.

I think this, combined with the ability to set the quantization level, would be quite cool. It would allow to manually loop the begining of a pattern and release it when the dancefloor is on fire - because that’s what live is all about ain’t it ?

(okay, I might be dreaming on this last one, I’m not sure it would be usefull to a lot of people :rolleyes: )

2

okay, no reaction … I’m new here, so please tell me : am I stating the obvious ? or has it been already covered many times in other discussions ? Or maybe what I’m describing is simply not interesting to anyone here ? Or even worse, Am I referring to things that actually already exists ?

3

Your ideas are totally relevant. I don’t know why someone hasn’t provided feedback - you even illustrate why a given feature needs to be there, instead of just proposing it.
I know why I haven’t provided feedback, however. There’s a bit of a discussion going on as to the direction we should be heading with regard to “patterns” in an arranger context. Any conclusion that we reach would affect lots of things, including this. So I guess I’ll stick to a bit of advice on the current functionality in Renoise?

First out - you’ve tried enabling pattern loop mode? Then try out the CTRL + arrow keys for further manipulations! The current pattern will loop until you switch to another, very much like you propose (except for the ability to decouple playback and edit position, which is already being discussed in a couple of other threads)

Also, there’s the block loop mode. Default shortcut is numpad>enter methinks - I’ve got it mapped somewhere else.

Put together, the sequence/pattern/block loops form a kind of loop-within-a-loop playback. Pretty powerful stuff actually. Also, try assigning track mute keyboard shortcuts to e.g. SHIFT+numbers for more hardware-style control.

4

Thanks a lot for your feedback. I’m going to check all this.

5

Trust me, the ideas are really being read and taken in consideration. Taktik is discussing several ideas about changing designs of Renoise. Including those how to deal with live usage of Renoise now versus how it could be, it comes back everytime, the previous version the timings needed to be tighter to make it a lot worthful for anything, including live events. And for sure ideas like Jiyunatori posted here are added to the pile of design-shaping. Without these additional ideas, Renoise would not be where it would be today.

You hammered the nail on its head, that’s why not always a response is given, but it is being read, don’t worry :) .
And yes, some ideas have been purposed in different contexts, but that does not matter, statistics on how many times the same feature is requested also adds up to the probability a feature ends up in Renoise.
(Not the speed of when though!)