I was curious about the techniques people use in renoise for mixing. I find this is one of the weak areas renoise has and hopefully will be changed in future releases. At the moment i mix using the track scopes. I look at the waveforms in the windows and use the gainer plugin to reduce them if they look like they are peaking.
I would love to know other approaches people use?
i never mix anything on the basis of visual feedback.
i always try to keep the overall level of each channel on low volume. the niveau of each channel’s volume is then determined by ear only.
this procedure of mixing is surely pretty amateur, but so far, i didn’t feel that i could obtain any better results with a proper mixer and db VU meters.
although i’m not saying that i would disgust such a feature 
Keith i think your right. Because i find when mixing that the levels are too high because of just using this approach. I think most times you have to reduce to have more. And who cares if its amateurish its the music that says it all!
Thanks for your feedback
Render your track and load it in a editor, here you can see what’s maybe wrong…
I would really like to see a more interactive/customizable renoise native spectrum analyzer, at least as a ‘DSP’, if not also the one at the top.
when it comes to spectrum analysis, voxengo span is the shiz. fully featured and really simple.
http://www.voxengo.com/product/SPAN/
it’s free too.
So far, when I am finished with a track (as in song) I usually have like 3 gainers cranked to +12db in each track (as in track) and my scopes just show some white noise. Oh, and the master slider is somewhere very near the left. This is because when I mix, I first hear the tracks that are not loud enough and so I make them louder until they fit. And I love renoise for enabling me to do it that way because it adjusts the master-volume … 
I tried that one, but the numbers don’t seem to jive with renoise or other spectrum analyzers I have used.
For example it’s showing a peak level of -5 db in renoise and some other spec. analyzer and it’s showing -20 or something on that one.
I’m sure this is due to ignorance on my part. If someone can explain how to set it up so that it is congruent with others I’d appreciate it, cause it looks cool.
it seems to match the renoise spectrum analyser, at least on my machine. i’ve yet to mix down on renoise so i don’t know if there are issues with it. it’s worked fine for me in other programs so far.
what other spectrum analysers do you use? i’d like to be able to test it against something else.
other than making sure the plugin is in the right position on the dsp chain (which, judging by the fact you seem to be able to use other analysers properly, it is), i can’t think what the problem might be (a screenshot of your voxengo plugin might help)
either way, i’m not going to be able to answer for at least a couple of days. i got 25% of my year’s uni course to learn in 48 hours. 
damn loof, i wish you all the best of luck on your exams!
BTW, I usually mix down on Renoise using compressors (grand comp or Triplecomp on the Master-track, or just on the drums or individual instruments, it all depends) and sometimes i use T-racks (external software). Not often though.
But hey, the EQ10 inside Renoise on the individual instruments helps ALOT if you’re looking to sharpen the quality of your renoise song, usually it’s the relations between the different frequencies that causes the most distortions and grunge inside the song… unless that’s what you’re into 
Edit: And remember to Pan the instruments “here and there”, this can “widen” the track more, and make it sound less mono.
Or am i talking gibberish now?
mixing sucks horsesass in ReNoise…
I assume you guys also don’t put every individual sample and instrument in it’s own channel. So if have 60 samples in my instrumentpanel, I have to mix/balance those and also mix/balance all the channels… sendchannels. And I have to do all that without any mixer GUI.
It helps a little to make three or four group tracks out of all the existing tracks in your mix by routing tracks to sendtracks.
In the end I’m always happy with the result.
oh, I usually have atleast 3 sendtracks. but I dont have 20 tracks of instruments, to begin with.
Sendtracks are wonderful things… especially if you want that compressed “big beat” sound to your drum beat, but you’re using individual hits on separate channels to build your beat ---- you can route them all to a Sendtrack and apply a bit of distortion and a properly tuned compressor… another nifty tool is a tobybear vst called MixBox… it sends sound from one instance of the VST to another… but use it wisely as unfortunately it can introduce lag =
Sendtracks are wonderfull things indeed, I always do that too when making a beat BYTE-smasher.
Besides being a good tool for making group tracks… Sendtracks will help you save cpu power .
Also I recently developped a tactic with three different kind of sendtracks as a way to create more structure in my huge rns songs. All channels in renoise end up being routed to a group track.
S01, S02, … : sendtracks for send-effects
G01, G02, … : sendtracks for grouptracks (for pads, basses, vocals, percussions, fx, etc)
Mix1, Mix2, … : sendtracks for mixing, balancing all the grouptracks as an alternative for not having a mixer.
maybe something for the developers to look at?
hello?
I set the master volume to 0db and absolutely don’t touch it. That avoids clipping. All sound regulations are done on the individual tracks I might have and it’s all done by ear.
I do all the mixing in renoise (that’s what I’m doing now) and render all tracks to individual wave files so I can do mastering in cubase.
Check out this section on the SDCompo forum: