Ok thanks for the response. When you sync a break you cannot adjust the transpose though…
You want the break to play in the same speed in a different pitch?
Timestretch the break using the 09xx command (link to tut).
Btw. 0180 is one octave up and 0280 one octave down. xx40 is a quarter octave and xxf0 is 3 quarters.
Sorry to contradict you but 0180 is eight semitones up (or a minor 6th interval), 0280 is eight semitones down (giving a major third interval). XXFO would give you an octave + 3 semitones in either direction.
Not wishing to be a dick but for the sake of accuracy xx10 in relation to pitch commands is equal to one semitone as I said before.
Volume command is your best frend for gating effects …0403 ( plays line at low volume )
0407
04FF ( full volume /gate
0407
This way you can create rhytmic /gated patterns using the 0400 command …It’s great for messing with drumloops
JUST DO IT
Thanks for the tutorial! This is good stuff, but the problem remains that you cant really do any of the pitch changing if the break is synced? Its like its a trade off. Either I sync the break or I choose to not sync it and get all these other options, but then the problem is that I like to work with many breaks and not all of them will be in the same tempo. So I guess the question I am trying to ask is how do you work with a bunch of breaks that are in different tempos and still have all the control over messing with pitch and everything?
To me the only option seems to be to go into an external program and warp them all to the same tempo and then import them into renoise so that they wont have to be synced… but then that sucks because if I decide later that I want a different tempo I will be screwed… am I missing something here? I feel like there is some little detail that I some how have not picked up on…
you could sync it like this:
load break
timestretch it
render the timestretched break (in whatever pitch you want) into a new sample
voila, new synced break.
but actually i dont think you should bother too much about the breaks syncing. I guess if you wanna loop the break over and over and then swap it to another break that also loops, syncing would be important. but if you chop the breakbeats up into different samples and make your own drum beats it doesnt really matter if the original sample is synced or not? plus you can adjust pitch and finetuning.
i say, just skip the syncing for now and just mess around with cutting breaks up and have fun 
Perhaps I didn’t explain it very well or maybe I’m not getting what you’re trying to achieve but just in case:
This adjusts the transpose and fine-tuning settings to sync the break perfectly to the number of lines but allows you to still play notes from the keyboard so you can combine it with 09xx to do junglist pitched up snares rolls, cymbals, etc. You just click this once for each break you are using after setting the appropriate number of lines.
Just to clear up any confusion, pitch and time are not independent of each other in Renoise as they are in Ableton, as it does not have native time-stretching.
This is what I was basically looking for Thank you sir!
however I am finding that the time stretching in Renoise has its limits. The quality seems to degrade under changes in pitch much more easily than with REX files or when warping in Ableton. I really think that if Renoise added in a high quality transposition/ tempo warping system along side some sort of editor that would allow slices to be exchanged for different hits or different effects to be routed to individual slices that would put renoise up in the very top. Does anyone else think that these could be valid suggestions?
Yeah, limited to the extent there is no time-stretching in Renoise. Well not natively at least, there are two Tools using free time-stretch libraries (and do you honestly expect them to be as good as proprietary ones with massive fees?)
Interpolation, which is needed when playing samples away from their original pitch, can be selected between Off, Linear and Cubic. Which is more control that most software gives you (default is the higher quality cubic.)
Renoise has no Warping though, and that I find slightly more a problem than anything related directly to pitching breaks correctly. If you want to switch between a few different breaks they will usually have varying grooves from the original drummer, if you then have reinforced some sounds and layered over the top to fit nicely to one break when changing it you might find the hits have moved slight, due to the played groove, and thus you get some clashes or beats that sound out of time. Therefore either warping in an external program or slicing your breaks and programming all from the slices may help keep things sounding together but at the expense of the natural groove of the original samples.
http://tools.renoise.com/tools/rubberband-timestretchpitch-shift
This is what you need to process the breaks within Renoise. Just install the tool.
You can’t timestretch the samples the other way than 9xx effect or the rubberband tool. At least without using some VST effect. Don’t now how it is in Reason, but two of the ways I mentioned seem to be enough (at least for me).
Maybe, some special tool will do the timestretching of a better quality, but for drum loops is more than enough.
It works perfectly to do some minor reajustments like for example a lot of drum and bass breaks come in 172 BPM or 174 BPM, and it sounds pretty much the same after being timestretched to 170BPM. Original version of Amen Break, if I don’t get it wrong is at 140 BPM, 140->170, still sounding great. Even 92 or 120 to 170, is alright. So this BPM range covers all your needs, when it comes to break samples.
man i am positive you can do ALL the tricks this guy is doing within renoise! being creative with all fx commands and sample edits is key for this kind of madness.
OK, honestly, all the responses you got here are way overcomplicated. You don’t need timestretching (unless you want to create one very specific sound effect), you should almost never layer your breaks, you shouldn’t put any effects on your breaks unless you specifically want your break to sound like it has that effect on it, you don’t need multiple copies of the same break to do pretty much anything, etc…
Take a one bar break and make sure your song is at the same BPM as the break, so that if you just play C-4 of it on the one of a measure it loops perfectly. If it doesn’t, change your track BPM or adjust the actual break sample. This is the most important part.
Once your break is looping correctly, you can just start messing with it. There are a few key effects that do the majority of your break manipulation. Sample offset, retrigger, volume and pitch are basically enough to do 99% of mashup manipulation.
Here’s a track done 100% in Renoise with all the break stuff just done via pattern commands:
I’ll try to find the RNS on whatever external HD it’s on so I can post up some of the drum tracks and you can see how it works. I know I posted a tutorial a while back for something like this and as part of it I also made this:
http://atomly.com/music/atomly_rocksteady.mp3
That’s a chopped-up version of an old pop song using just the same pattern effects that you’d use on a break. Shows how much you can mash things just using the very simple built-in tools.
edit: time and experimentation.
You’re right.
successful music of this sort is about loving your gear/software and seeing what you can do with it. it isn’t so much about making music that sounds like this.