Pattern Building Blocks

Help, Support & Bugs Beginners Questions - Renoise
1

Hello. First, sorry for the unclear topic title, but I find it hard to name what I’m looking for (and therefore I found it hard to find an answer by my own on the site).

My question: is it possible to create/define some “blocks” or “tracks”, for example named like: groovybass#1, groovybass#2, normalpercussion, intensepercussion, lead#1, lead#2, lead#3, etc. Which then can be inserted and combined into patterns? Actually, I’m already doing this, but in an inefficient way, by creating them in some work patterns, and then copy/pasting combinations of them into new patterns. It works, but it is not very clear. For instance, to get an overview of the lead melody I have to manually see which notes are played and then recognize if it is lead#1 or 2 or 3. I’d rather simply see in some overview lead#1 followed by lead#2 where the bass changes from #2 to #1, etc. I hope you get my point.

Thanks in advance, I’m considering to buy renoise and this is the only thing that is preventing me from actually doing that.

2

Hi,

I will answer with the basics, maybe someone can follow-up with more details.

You can name patterns. Click and drag the right edge of the Pattern Sequencer over to the right. This will expand it and reveal the name slots.

@see: http://tutorials.renoise.com/wiki/Pattern_Sequencer#Overview

In the mixer, you can name tracks, and drag and drop them to re-order them.

@see: http://tutorials.renoise.com/wiki/Pattern_Editor#Adding.2C_Removing.2C_Duplicating_and_Re-ordering_Tracks

In the pattern matrix, you can manually assign the color of blocks. So, if you want to color lead#1 red and lead#2 green, you can.

@see: http://tutorials.renoise.com/wiki/Pattern_Matrix#Colouring_Blocks

A combination of these can help your workflow. There’s no magic solution, though.

3

yeah, i guess he’s talking about using ‘clips’. which cannot be done. despite defining what you actually wanted and stating it cannot be done, you should really look at Conner_BW’s answer instead of mine, as his is very useful for finding a method as close as possible to what you want.
(or, quite possibly, his answer was exactly what you were looking for)

4

Ok, thanks! So to easily recognize things (e.g. leads) in the bird-eye-view I either need to assign colors to them, or (as work around) create a separate track for each lead (so any notes played in track lead#1 belong obviously to the melody lead#1). Now that leads to another question: is Renoise lacking some feature that I consider useful, or is my workflow wrong? I mean: to me this seems functionality everyone might need: combining and arranging “clips”, isn’t it?

5

do a forum search; there’s already been a lengthy discussion about clips in renoise. i just look at the pattern and combine that with my memory to know what is what. but everyone works differently of course.

6

I’ll do that, thanks. (I didn’t know the term “clip” before it was brought up here, otherwise I naturally would have already searched the forum).

7

@wintermute: regarding my earlier statement about clips not being possible: turns out i was wrong.