Overlaying Patterns

I’m a new convert to Renoise, and I’m making electronic music for the first time.

I find Renoise great for composing beats and melodies, but when I want to take those beats and melodies and start playing with order and the number of times they’re repeated (i.e. actually make them into a song), I find the pattern list limiting. I’ve been fooling around with REAPER, but I figured I’d get some second opinions.

P.S. Hi. Excuse the ridiculous pseudonym. I’m going with it until I can make something I’m actually proud of.

EDIT: I just had an idea. I could just render my patterns, import them as samples, and use Renoise to sequence those. It’s a little inelegant, since I can’t make changes on the fly.

If you’re moving whole sections of music around, then the pattern sequencer is fine. If you’re mixing and matching tracks into different patterns, then yeah, it’s a bit unwieldy. It’s pretty easy to click the new pattern button and then copy/paste a track in, but if a musical phrase lasts longer than a pattern then it’s not too usable.

The only options you’re going to have if you want to mix and match that way are going to involve bouncing to disk. You can either bounce to disk and then move the loops around in a host sequencer or do it in Renoise. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

I find Renoise’s workflow great to compose beat and phrases but when it comes to the composition i prefer to export my patterns as loops (often with a lenght of 512) and use that ones in a external sequencer.

The function that exports tracks in separate WAV files is definetely my friend.

my 2c.