Hey, I made a post about this years ago, and im sure there are lots of other post about the subject.But, in that vimeo video showing Aphex Twins Vordhosbn in player pro, you can see that there is a piano roll that is integrated into the daw. I also heard somewhere that there is a piano function like this hidden in renoise. Does anyone know how to do it? Can someone make a tool that makes renoise have a piano roll? It’s been the achilles heel of renoise for me since the beginning and my music is much less melodic because of it.
I don’t see anything you can do with a pianoroll that you can’t do with a tracker. It’s actually literally the same thing.
What bugs you so much ?
@Dylan G:
Does anyone know how to do it? Can someone make a tool that makes renoise have a piano roll?
I never heard about a hidden piano roll in Renoise. But yes there is at least a work in progress tool. Take a look here:
https://forum.renoise.com/t/work-in-progress-piano-roll/48049
It’s actually literally the same thing.
This is a very sensitive topic. I like some of the features of a piano roll but don’t really like using one.
My biggest fear is that Renoise dies and I am forced to use a piano roll or use the last version of renoise before it died. future kids telling me I’m so old for using renoise. Making fun of me.
There was some post a while back on how to implement something like a piano roll into a tracker. Basically creating colored blocks where the note starts and ends. There are some tools
like posted above. Maybe that is what you saw. There is hidden stuff in renoise. Very hidden things. I wouldn’t venture too far.
I also heard somewhere that there is a piano function like this hidden in renoise.
I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
/a lone wolf howls in the background
Edit: It was an alpha concept easter egg, in an alpha, maybe a beta, not ready, no usable, I doubt it’s in the binary so no way to activate it.
“Programmed by Aphex Twin” - Renoise 3.2
Ride the hype team.
You people got mixed up a bit here;
There aint no ‘hidden’ piano roll in #Renoise…
…Renoise IS HIDDEN in the PIANO!
People just having no #idea 
@Dylan G:
I never heard about a hidden piano roll in Renoise. But yes there is at least a work in progress tool. Take a look here:
https://forum.renoise.com/t/work-in-progress-piano-roll/48049
No it’s not. Pianoroll is an horizontal grid where the pitch is defined by the Y axis. A tracker is a vertical grid where the pitch is defined by a letter and a number.
Everyone prefers one over the other, that’s for sure. But it’s still pretty much exactly the same thing and you can easily switch from one to the other.
I prefer the tracker approach because the pianoroll tend to make you “draw” patterns more than anything.
But common. It’s still pretty much the same.
Standard notation is different, for instance. Or step sequencers, or all the crazy types of mathematical stuff you see on modular gears.
This is a very sensitive topic. I like some of the features of a piano roll but don’t really like using one.
My biggest fear is that Renoise dies and I am forced to use a piano roll or use the last version of renoise before it died. future kids telling me I’m so old for using renoise. Making fun of me.
There was some post a while back on how to implement something like a piano roll into a tracker. Basically creating colored blocks where the note starts and ends. There are some tools
like posted above. Maybe that is what you saw. There is hidden stuff in renoise. Very hidden things. I wouldn’t venture too far.
That’s a real problem with trackers : it looks like an excel document more than anything. But that’s the way it is.
It’s fully off topic, but let’s be honest : there’s no big names promoting it nor any really good videos/channels showing what are the benefits of using something that looks like it’s been made in the 80s* (good tuts exist. Just nothing that make you go “oh yeah, I get it”).
If I were the renoise team I’d throw some money on the table to hire Blue Stalhi to make few tutorials. But I don’t think they have extra cash to spend. (actually sometimes, I wonder if they make any money at all)
*no offense to the Renoise team. Renoise is as beautiful as a tracker can be. Trackers are just ugly… (or pretty in their own way).
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The only reason I want a piano roll is because i like being able to move the little bars up and down and use my ears to hear if its in key or not. I find punching the notes in with my keyboard and having the note and octave represented in a cell to be confusing. The piano roll way lets me see where my notes are in relation to each other and helps me make chords and build melodys. I’ve made melodic stuff with renoise when i’m really into it and really motivated. Renoise is my daw and I just wish it had a piano roll. I always imagined that there could be a window that you could open up to put in note info and have the tracker have the note starts and stops work accordingly. In player pro it works exactly the way I imagined. I don’t want to use pp, I want to use renoise. I’ll check out that WIP tool. Thanks yall.
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What are the things that keep you with Renoise?
Even a vertical Piano Roll could be great, but what keeps me with Renoise is, of course, the tracker itself!
It’s a cruel dilemna between making all with a keyboard on a tracker and making all with the mouse on a piano roll.
Both offer an interesting workflow, and the mix between them could be a perfect combo!
Hey - just a thought. Could it not work in a dialog, like the pattern editor. When you go back to edit its mapped to the tracker.
A piano roll is the only thing I miss in renoise from other DAW. My music theory is hitty, but I can sort of play the piano by sight… never been able to read music - or to think in letters for music. A dyslexic mental block maybe.
Man ignore my comments - I’ve just jumped into this forum full of enthusiasm for renoise. I’ve just read through the linked piano roll threads and seen people are on the case in much more detail ( and there’s an awesome looking project in the works)
What are the things that keep you with Renoise?
The fact that it is a tracker, 0sxx, being able to change the colors, the workflow I’ve developed for myself using it over the years, this forum, the fact that I can ask if someone can make a piano roll tool and someone will link me to a work in progress, the list goes on. I don’t think any other trackers allow you to use Vst’s but I could be wrong about that, don’t claim to be a tracker guru, just really love Renoise.
For other trackers with VST support, you can take a look here and search for “VST” keyword in the page:
Yes, sorry, when I said “search VST in the page”, it was not with the internal searching tool but with a classic CTRL+F searching method.
Anyway, there are several soundtrackers that allow VST/VSTi support, but Renoise is definitively the best of them, true.
For now, why not use Rewire? Every time I think I can use the flexibility and ease of a piano roll I rewire a sequencer (Reason in my case) to renoise. This way I have a piano roll at hand with years of development and testing alongside renoise.