'live' Pattern-change Behaviour

Ideas & suggestions
1

I’ve mentioned it a few times before, and this seems like the time to bring it up again - but with a caveat.

Everyone’s got ‘live’/arranger/sequencer ideas in mind, and that’s excellent, but we all know it’ll be a huge big project for the next generation of Renoise - i.e. not Renoise 2.0.

In the meantime, a tiny optional tweak could be made to the replay behaviour of Renoise that would satisfy a great many Renoise composers who perform their work live (in the meantime, remember, which could be months or years!).

Just to recap:

Currently, if you switch patterns during playback at say line 32 of a pattern, Renoise continues by playing from line 33 of the pattern you’ve just switched to. This means if you want to manually move from pattern 0, your intro, to pattern 4, your chorus (or whatever) in order to play with the structure of the song on the fly, you have to stumble through patterns 1, 2, and 3 - by which time playback is almost ready to move to the next pattern. Epic fail! You now look like a fool on stage!

But wait! Why not have a toggle option to play to the end of the current (initial) pattern you were on before moving to the new one? Patt 0 starts, you get to line 20, you use the keyboard shortcuts (or mouse) to move to pattern 4, and then when pattern 0 is finished, Renoise picks up at the start of pattern 4!

Some of you will think this is an awfully easy concept to grasp, but you’d be amazed how difficult it’s been to get people to understand it in the past. But I HAVE triumphed - pailes, the charming developer of Milkytracker, implemented this at my request as a ‘Live’ mode, which is a small button marked ‘L’ (with corresponding keyshortcut) which toggles this behaviour. I got the idea from AHX tracker on the Amiga which behaves like this by default - probably not an intentional feature, but something that allows me to use AHX as a really versatile live tool.

So please please PLEASE: any live musicians who think that this feature would give them SOME live usability of Renoise beyond just having to stand next to the laptop twiddling a filter cutoff MIDI control - while we wait for what will definitely be an earth-shattering 2.1/whatever superlivehypermegaarrangerninja release, get behind this suggestion for a quick-fix…or just gimme your feedback :)

Thanks!

p.s. - er…well it wasn’t a caveat per se, more of a qualifier - I just meant to say that Renoise 2.0 is looking great, lots of excellent work’s gone into it, and this isn’t an ungrateful request for a huge load of shit but just a little tweak :D Put the inarticulacy down to new-version excitement.

2

That’s a +1 from me, I can relate to the ‘tiny change which makes a huge impact’.

3

Impulse tracker had Queue Pattern feature. (Just as a sidenote)

4

I once reviewed a steinberg program named Sequel which also had this behaviour when playing in their arrangers live mode. Very simple addition that would be very cool indeed to have right now! :0)

5

Phuk, hyperlinking not working. Check this out, http://www.renoise.com/board/index.php?sho…ic=5226&hl=

I agree, original suggestion is very logical. Play position control is pretty primitive all in all.

6

How about opening a second instance and load the same song there, copy the pattern to clipboard and then copy the clipboard contents to Renoise?
Generating a one-pattern song on-the-fly.
A new experimental workflow.

7

+1
that would be great!
…even LSDJ it’s mad fun to jam like that !

8

+1 from me.
I jam alot with renoise, eh … actualy its more, I jam, renoise does not atm.

9

a big +1
would be really really nice

10

There doesn’t even need to be a button anywhere. Just provide a shortcut for those who need this (hidden feature FTW). Later, the button could appear alongside a numeric input for navigating to a certain pattern?

11

The GUI is the most tricky part here. You want/need to see which pattern changes are pending. Where you currently are and where you will be.

12

For switch patterns, yes, but this feature is IMHO more usful when navigating through the sequencer. How could this look like then?

13

We’ll come up with something :slight_smile:

Edit: how about this - when the magic button/shortcut is pressed, the thick outline that highlights the current position becomes dotted.
Once it’s dotted, we can freely move back and fourth within the pattern sequence without causing changes to the playback position.
It will stay dotted, until the currently playing pattern reach it’s end, and then, the position at which our dotted outline is at, will start playing, and normal behaviour resumes.

So, instead of being a permanent toggle/switch, it could be thought of as a ‘temporary mode’…

14

BAM! Beauty.

15

I intend to use graphics as means of persuation as well :slight_smile:

16

Well make sure it’s simple, like the original poster stated. A live mode can be worked on for later versions, but for 2.0 something simple can be done.

In Bantai’s example, i would even change underline to yellow. So you have

  • Green: Playing
  • Yellow: Next
  • Red (Orange): Not in queue.

Like traffic lights.

And if you need to loop stuff you can use the little “loop boxes” to the left of it.

Furthermore, i’d leave it on in follow mode too. If you’re not changing the yellow box on your own, then it will just move automatically, so it won’t affect anything, and look a bit like a “gradient fade” (green → yellow → orange)

17

+1 from me, as this would allow “offline editing” while playing

18

Well, I’m very much opposed to using colors, for a number of reasons:

  • Colors could indicate different parts of a song in a future version of Renoise
  • Shades are already being used (check out “seq.highlights” in song settings)

So instead, I came up with the following (sry for the dark color-scheme)

Note that insert/clone icons are getting dangerously close, and might need a rework.

19

You guys, you guys! All great elaborations; Bantai/danoise, that seems like a great visual indicator of what’s going on. Milkytracker currently doesn’t reflect anything in the sequence list (although it was proposed, by means of some flashing gifs I drew up) so it’s a little haphazard…although fine for me. The pattern changes to the target pattern, without follow, until it starts playing/following…if that makes sense.

This dotted-line thing is great. I’d envisaged this being a keyshortcut-operated thing, but yeah - mouse-operated is cool too. Even if you make a mistake with the mouse, you can probably rectify it before the pattern-change :)

20

+1 Holds back live use at the moment.