I was messing around in Cubase with the beats and i created a simple tutorial song in Renoise on how to do Normal / Dotted / Triplet beats, with and without Grooving. I hope i made it without errors
Renoise doesn’t put notes down like bars of course(1/1 ~ 1/128 D and T). So i recreated these on the pattern using the Renoise Sample library.
Maybe other Renoise guru’s here can add and correct stuff to it, or do the same using different methods.
I’m sure for alot of people this is common knowledge, but i think a tutorial like this would be great for Renoise Beginners (the ones that are used to horizontal based notation systems), or the ones that are completely new.
You don’t need to enable/disable groove on every other pattern line.
The groove (ie. the delayed timing that gives the swing) is actually only applied to every other 16th note in your pattern, like so:
At 4 LPB:
00 No groove
01 Groove
02 No groove
03 Groove
…
At 8 LPB:
00 No groove
01 —
02 Groove
03 —
04 No groove
05 —
06 Groove
07 —
…
And so on…
By constantly turning the groove on and off manually, you’re actually interfering with it and getting (kinda) incorrect timing. In your example, you can actually achieve the exact same results by setting all the groove sliders to 50%, and then simply enabling groove once for the whole pattern.
Maybe this has just a effect on its own in a unusual way, but it sounds good (even with synced delays from VSTi’s etc). That incorrect timing is what it makes sound more natural. i’ve been listening quite closely to the normal groove method and it is different. The only thing that messes up with this method is the wav-renderer (you have to create empty patterns at the end of the song to be able to render the whole song)
I already made a topic about this a year ago. See the attachment song in my last post.
I still kinda miss that 1 swing slider Noisetrekker used to have, it was simple and effective and it sounded right as far as i can remember.
In this song i used a closed hihat with delay in Nexus VSTi, with 1/4 Delay the closed hihats starts to sound like shakers, with 1/8 Delay it sounds less shaker-ish. i kinda like this effect. you can hear it at 0:07 seconds of the song. This song was made at LPB 10 and 138 BPM, Groove on/off at each 2 steps
Please believe me: It’s definitely not different. (At least not in this particular simple example)
This:
… will produce exactly the same results as this:
You can render them both and compare the waveforms. They will be identical.
The only reason I said “incorrect timing” is because your pattern commands were actually cutting into the groove timings and stopping them prematurely, resulting in “incorrect” groove when compared to what you actually have defined in the song settings. You had groove set to 100%, but your pattern commands were actually disabling the groove half-way through the grooved/delayed note, therefore reducing it to the incorrect amount of groove (in this case, exactly half of its intended groove, or 50% of 100%). That’s why, in your example, setting groove to 50% and simply enabling it once at the start of the pattern produces exactly the same result as using 100% and rapidly turning it on and off again.
Groove only affects how the actual notes are triggered in the pattern. It doesn’t change your song tempo or speed, therefore it won’t have any effect on the timing of any delays (whether native or VST).
I won’t bother to discuss anything from Noisetrekker, or older methods to repeatedly change the song speed with commands, because these are obviously different techniques in their own right.
Yes you are right, it does sound identical. It’s a bit mathematical.
I saw in one of your other topics
If you recreate this with a closed hihat at LPB10 it will start to sound like shakers with the delay on at line sync 8 or 10 (note this time the groove on/off is each 2 steps, not 1).
How would i convert this one to the normal groove method? is it also 50%? This is the kind of delay (shaker-ish) i want along with grooving. I couldn’t find the proper solution with normal grooving (the delay sounds different). maybe because the LPB is at a weird setting. I’m just still scratching my head over this effect because i’m not so mathematical.
