Welcome to the first edition of a monthly Renoise centric challenge !
The monthly challenge is not a competition, it’s a way to share practice and expand creativity together.
You can spend a few minutes to a whole month of work on it, it’s up to you. If you can share your .xrns that would be great (demo users welcome), but you can also share a rendered audio file. Even if you feel stupid about your creation, please share it, someone may learn something about it, you never know. The produced piece of music must comply with a few constraints that will change every month. Sometimes the constraints may appear stupid, but this is what gives some fun and push creativity.
For this month, I picked 3 of the most voted constraints on the poll, which are :
- The piece of music must be exactly 1 minute long - The .xrns file must be less than 435.49 Kb (I picked this number randomly between 10 and 1000) - All the sounds of the piece must be derived from this sample https://freesound.org/people/Sruddi1/sounds/34872/ (it was featured as the “random sample of the day”). The sounds must be crafted with the built-in sample editor
If you struggle with some stuff or you would like to share some impressions, I would be very pleased to read from you in this thread
Post your piece (or your pieces) whenever you want (even work in progress), I’m very excited to listen to it.
Open Renoise, press keys, click, copy, paste, turn knobs !
I must say, when I saw the source file I scratched my head a bit. But there’s really a lot here to work with.
For drums/percussion, there’s a tiny, almost hidden mouth noise (almost a cough) towards the end that has a great natural transient to it. That sound alone, normalized, could be the basis for almost anything percussion-wise.
I’m already way down the rabbit hole. This is going to be a blast.
I’m having a lot of fun with this already doing some sound design. I have never, ever paid attention to the xrns file size. Don’t even know what the size of a an empty xrns file is*. So I’m not sure if I’ll be able to adhere to that rule. But we’ll see.
Anyways jrm, thanks for setting this up!
*Turns out an empty xrns files is 3.49kb / 4.00kb space on disk.
Messed around this morning and came up with this - it was fun working with constraints, making a mess and just experimenting to make sounds (and also learning how large the average xrns file is haha)
This xrns file so far is 112Kb. It was 11.025KHz all the way
I might be in the minority here, but I’m keeping it 100% Renoise. Meaning, no external VSTs, no external sample manipulation, just vanilla Renoise and native FX.
It might be more challenging, but I think it fulfills the theme better, and it will 1) force me to learn Renoise more intimately, 2) take me out of my comfort zone and force me to make more creative choices, and 3) really provide a showcase for what Renoise is capable of—which I think is a nice thing to have.
Same here. Might render some samples with external effects applied if the need arises. Totally fits within the rules as you can apply the DSP with the SFX button in the sampler.
Anyways, if the point is to share so we can learn from one and other it is best to have things as much native Renoise as possible. As we don’t all have the same plugins installed. The Challenge for me is going to be the reverb. I’m not the biggest fan of the native options.
Indeed, indeed. Literally everyone else is taken.
Seriously though, I feel people should do what gives them the best results. If your process relies on external effects, go for it. Just have fun and try to try something new / different from your usual approach.
Yup, I feel the same way.
Don’t burn yourself out. You’ve got till December 31st to work on this. So no rush. But it is mighty nice to have that momentum of doing things every day, right?
@stoiximan your new profile image somehow freaks me out. Such a radical change. Takes some getting used to. Looks good though! Renoise FTW.
The global idea of this challenge is to learn doing unusual stuff and new techniques. You absolutely can use VST if that’s your mood. This is not a competition, nothing to loose, no disqualification. Using VST sounds a little offbeat but why not!
So far here is what I learnt :
exploring the sample, and try to identify what characteristics would make a good instrument
sample editing like interpolation, volume maximizer, effect rendering
the technique of layering samples to make them more real
renoise xrns files are very thin by nature
As a noob musician (and renoise user) I find this stuff very challenging. I do have a 1 minute song (for what it’s worth), but the file is a fat 2.5M.
I hope everyone is taking somethingout of this challenge.
You may have done this already but in case you haven’t. the original sample is stereo. There is no difference between the left and right channel. So you can turn it into mono without losing any information.
And once you’ve made your instruments you can delete the source file from your project.
i cannot decide if your track motivates me or makes me avoid this challenge lol.
Great track. I love the energy. Bass is groovy as hell! Drums are awesome as well!
*I would personally like more ‘specific’ upper range synth in terms of notation * OR just sidechain the hell out of it to the drums and make it more distant as an ‘atmosphere’ type of effect
