Piano Roll

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:

https://woolyss.com/tracking-trackers.php

So I was correct

https://woolyss.com/tracking-trackers.php?s=vst

No.

( Also PlayerPro is the tracker from the Aphex Vid. )

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.

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.

True, I’ve done it too.

To TS: try to connect a midi keyboard for more ‘melodic’ things. It helped me a while ago…

Please stop this pianoroll stupid suggestions. Anyone still need it??

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”).

why should we give a damn :drummer:.?

Learn your commands , that’s all there is to it .

No piano roll , live with it …or move on .

why should we give a damn :drummer:.?

Learn your commands , that’s all there is to it .

No piano roll , live with it …or move on .

He did not want a pianolol in Renoise, silly. He assumed that a plain tracker view without any aodix or radium like extensions won’t sell because of the lack of visual attractivity.

The best app for cutting ringtones

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.audiko2.pro

Really don’t understand people who choose to use a Tracker and then complain about it being, you guessed it, a tracker rather than a traditional DAW. Seems like your needs would be better served by a ‘standard’ DAW. Half the point of using Renoise for me is that its features / approach doesn’t overlap with other DAWs out there. It specializes, instead. It’s the best Sampler + Tracker I could ask for. If I wanted traditional piano roll based composition, I wouldn’t be using it.

IMO it persists because there already have been concepts going into this direction. Some zooming trackers (Dream Station I/II, ReViSiT) went a step further, Aodix went a step further by drawing the note rectangles, Buzz replaced commands by only values so to say and didn’t keep the order list as it was. So when it makes sense to shift away from Fast Tracker or whatever you consider being the tracker identity per se, it’s nice to have and doesn’t hurt anyone. E.g. the order list, the fact that in Renoise all tracks have their pattern end and start at the same point in time, is still there although e.g. Buzz abandoned it long time ago and it always looked senseful to me. If you prefer a traditoinal approach - it looks possible to keep the “big solid blocks” despite the DAW allowing you to have “overlapping clips”. No one would lose much with a new possibility, although you can argue that you will lose support for the old work flow over time. Ironically, the order list does reflect the music I usually created. But as long as e.g. automation has these “stop and go” points, it’s simply a bit weird to use, even if it has become merely a visual issue. Usually the curves spanned several patterns and so the issue was back in my mind again.

Also, it’s too hard to record (not step-edit) for a longer time and then edit notes, partly because of the pattern length issue, partly because of delay column values that won’t change without a lot more editing (alternatively have insanely high “zoom” forever via LPB), partly because you could lose off-commands when you try to “reorganize notes as objects” (maybe that concept should be seen as invalid in a tracker, I don’t really know). Midi input has been there for a long time, so if there should be an idea how to improve it, put it in, it’s currently like half way there. IMO, see “piano roll” as placeholder for things that could be easier, independend of what the solution would look like.

Renoise offers a very nice layout that you won’t find in many piano roll based DAWs, e.g. FL Studio has been awful with the windows floating around for a long time. So, some people - at least I did - have picked Renoise not mainly because of the cells and commands, but because of some strengths that don’t come from the tracker part, and for some strengs that are a consequence of the tracker part - most importantly intensive PC-keyboard usage.

My favorite reason not to want a tracker with piano roll view, as long as there is no good concept how to combine them, is this: When each column stands for each midi key (see Raul’s piano roll concept https://forum.renoise.com/t/piano-roll-integrated-in-pattern-editor-a-advanced-pattern-editor/46102), you would end up pressing the cursor keys a lot more. What in a piano roll DAW is the mouse moving a little bit would be you hitting cursor-right key up to ~11 times. Yet, it would be possible to let the cursor jump to a corresponding column when you press a virtual piano key on the PC-keyboard, which would be ok. In general, if a piano roll would mean I had to use only the mouse, or - worse - had to use a combination of mouse and keyboard, then I wouldn’t like it.

I recently came up with my own idea for a piano roll/tracker combo which I think is much better than any other idea I’ve seen.

Please have a look at my thread. I would love to see this implemented in Renoise:

https://forum.renoise.com/t/waveform-piano-roll-idea/47624