I was very excited about the new instrument features of Renoise first. So I used it for a drum kit. But then I realized that there are quite a bunch of restrictions / features missing that actually prevent this kind of structure for a drum kit (using basic fx like eq etc)…
I was not able to:
negative delay the snare a bit
using multiple tracks. So I couldn’t use an env follower on just the bass drum to create a proper bass side chain (eg to reduce the bass output on bass drum)
So for now, I won’t use fx inside a drumkit anymore.
The problem is that FX could in principle be used to apply volume, pan, etc. changes to a group of layered samples (due to the lack of sample groups). But the limitation you mentioned prevents this of course.
In general, the usage of the sampler for drums is quite limited indeed and it is unclear to me how taktik and crew intended it to be used for drums.
I also created a topic recently to put some focus on using the sampler for drums, which seems to be an afterthought at the moment: Better support for drumkits in the sampler
It would be nice to be able to use 1 instrument with fx in multiple tracks, but it’s not really a big problem to either just duplicate the instrument or make a separate instrument for different drums IMO. It could be more convenient, but it’s not limiting what i can achieve and it’s still a lot more powerful than the earlier instrument section.
Well, I cannot achieve what I want actually. It is always a choice. Either I want to record the drums live, then I need to keep it in one instrument and I cannot mix it later on. Or I want to mix it, but then I cannot record them live and have to programme them. So, yeah, it is always a trade of. Not to speak of sharing drumsets with others…
Copying the same drumset is an option for now, although, this increases the used memory of course. So, for big drumsets with a lot of velocity layers, this can become problematic.
I don’t think it increases the memory usage much more than it would have if the instrument could play in multiple tracks. You can also trim down the instrument to work for the specific task, making it less cpu hungry and possibly even use less cpu than the multiple track processing.
You could record everything live, then copy the notes to different tracks afterwards. Of course it’s much more work, but if you’re worried about not being able to reproduce the beat by manual tracking and still want to mix the different drums later, then this is a possibility.
Maybe someone could write a tool that lets you distribute the different key inputs from one track and move them into separate tracks then duplicate and reassign the instruments?
Of course it would! If you copy an instrument, it uses double the amount of memory. It is just loaded into memory again, at a different address.
Yes, that is true, but it’s cumbersome.
Again, yes, possible in principle, but not an acceptable workflow at all.
Well, I was thinking about this, too. Maybe I can adept my Split Into Separate Tracks tool to copy (and maybe trim) the instrument, too. I’ll look into it. But a proper native solution is of course preferred on the long run.
But it would have to be parallel processed (multiplying the fx chains) to play in several tracks, at least that is how i interpreted what taktik said in the other thread.
I picture the tool i mentioned as the virtual keyboard, where you can selct any keys from c-0 to b-9, give them a value and then the tool sorts all these values into separate tracks.
