Live Pattern-change Behaviour

Ideas & suggestions
1

As this is my first post on here, I’ll start with a hello. Hello!

Please do stop me if this has been discussed in the past, or even if it’s actually in Renoise and I’m just too stupid to have noticed. I’ve searched the Forum quite a bit but can’t find any references to it…

Anyway, I’m thinking about playback behaviour when you hot-switch between patterns. CTRL+UP/DOWN does this, and like Fasttracker and many other trackers, Renoise jumps instantly to the pattern you’ve chosen (cycling through intermediary patterns, if it’s a few patternlist blocks away from where you were) and continues playing each row in order, but now on the new pattern. So you’ve had half of the original pattern, then half of the destination pattern.

When I use AHX/THX Tracker live on the Amiga, I take advantage of the fact that when you change the pattern during replay (same key-shortcut, actually!), it plays through to the end of the current pattern before moving to the new one. This is really fantastic for live use, because you can set up a load of patterns that fit into oneanother reasonably well, then chop up the order in which they’re played on the fly - offering quite a bit of flexibility from the static order you have in a non-live situation. But, of course, you can plan ahead a little bit since you’ve always got time to find the next pattern…with Renoise’s pattern-naming feature, this practice just balloons in potential. A couple of other trackers work like this - when I nagged him, Xeron actually put it into HivelyTracker as an alternative key-shortcut, so there was always a choice between merging straight into the new pattern (as Renoise currently does) and playing to the end before moving to the new one (as AHX does).

Basically, Renoise is my dream-come-true audio package for both studio and live work, and if this was possible, as a toggleable option, I think a lot of people would be able to work with a degree of abstraction and improvisation that’d really free them up and allow them to keep their live stuff interesting and unexpected.

So what are people’s thoughts? Would this make anyone’s life easier? Has anyone else got experience of this from other trackers in a live situation? More to the point, is it a current feature of Renoise that I’m enormously too stupid to have noticed:D

Sorry to have made such a rambling explanation, but a lot of confusion often arises when I explain it to people. For people who aren’t so obsolete-tracker-fetishistic as me, a good analogy is Propellerheads Rebirth, which has similar pattern-switching behaviour (possibly mimicking all those expensive hardware samplers from the 90’s that I couldn’t afford, and never needed because I had an Amiga:P).

Thanks for reading, anyone who’s still awake at the end of this!

2

Good idea I guess, probably not a huge fuss to implement, and in the meantime you could try if dragging the patterns around is any use/fun?

3

hello lightbomb!
well said. count me in.

welcome onboard.

4

Johann - cheers:) I just had a try at dragging and…it’s a tiny bit clumsy, I think. It was taking me a couple of tries to actually get the pattern dragged, instead of just selected, and that’s with a mouse. Laptop touchpad in a live situation…could go horribly wrong:P I’m sure it’d come with practice though.

5

You need to select first, then drag :)

6

Heh, just discovered after posting. Again, makes it a bit cumbersome for live use…but thanks for the tip! Now I know how it works, and that’s the important thing:)

7

I just want to bump this - partly because I think it’d be a really important thing to keep live users’ appetites sated while they wait for a full Arranger and partly to point out that Milkytracker has now implemented this functionality.

You can check it out by trying Milky, loading one of the example XM files and pressing CTRL+L (or the tiny ‘L’ button near the top). Now when you use Shift+L or Shift+R to navigate through patterns, which would usually jump straight to the start of the target pattern, it plays the remainder of the old pattern first so that the transition is smooth.

Though I don’t need to reiterate it, for Renoise to do this would mean that even without a full-scale arranger, which might take months or years to appear, it would offer pretty big possibilities for live rearrangement on the fly - especially with big patterns which the performer could rename for reference purposes, thus allowing a fresh interpretation of their music at each gig.

8

+1 for your suggestion.

9

+1
Sounds easy to implement a switch for it, and it’s real useful when playing live or even while making the choon.

Also: awesome avatar, amiga roxxorz.

10

Cheers ikke;) And yeah - I’d never thought of it like that: it would be useful for testing a transition between two patterns without jumbling up your whole pattern sequence, that sort of thing.

11

+1 - Very important addition IMO. Could simply be an extra row inside the pattern-arranger. Clicking any of the fields would “schedule” that pattern to play next…or something like that :slight_smile:

12

i was just “jamming” with a friend of mine (midi synced laptops), and this would have been an incredibly useful addition. peace

13

Danoise - a cunning plan! With an accompanying shortcut though, because some of us have become quite used to fumbling in the dark on the keyboard ;)

Mushen - yeah, similar story here: when I was jamming with someone on my Amiga ages ago, I realised how useful this feature was in AHX.