Pipe Organ

Help, Support & Bugs Beginners Questions - Renoise
1

I am composing a fairly extensive pipe organ piece. I don’t have an actual pipe organ, but I do have Renoise! (And some handy software synths).

As I see it, I have two options. Which one would be the best? Or am I missing something?

Basics

Pipe organs may have three or four manuals plus pedals. Each note that’s hit may sound more than one set of pipes. Therefore, each key that’s hit can be responsible for causing more than one note to sound. This is NOT the same as a chord – it’s a voicing for a note.

First Idea: Aeolus

I do have the Aeolus software synth. It can simulate one voicing per manual, and handle up to four manuals (I, II, III, and Pedal). It has on deck reverb and simulation of several common pipes.

So my first strategy would be to rig Aeolus to work with Renoise, then program in the notes via MIDI. However, I’ve a feeling this would blow the whole ‘render file as wav’ trick, not to mention all my cool mixdown options. Although Aeolus sounds great played improv style through my PC speakers, well, the quality of the recordings don’t really match up to professional sounds, say for example NPR’s ‘Pipe Dreams’ program. I think I could probably soar if I just had more control over the mixdown elements.

Second Idea: Sound Fonts

I have been creating a lot of custom instruments, mainly percussion, and in the process I realized there HAS to be a way to transform .sf2 files into renoise instruments. I just wasn’t able to find it. If there was, I could use all the powers of Renoise with … ta daah, my own virtual Renoise pipe organ, loaded with racks and racks of custom pipes, as many as I could find and sample. I could even drop in a few unusual pipes for later from Csound or my Nord Lead or even the Hammond.

Ah, but the first sticking point: how to create those instruments rapidly and efficiently.

Second sticking point: how to get more than one note to sound at once. Keyjazz? That’s a lot of manual programming for something that I just know has a clever shortcut. A real pipe organ just has a set of pipes that all trigger at once, no matter what key is pressed. Any way to duplicate this in Renoise?

I’m just looking for ideas. I’m still learning the program, and I’ve only recently gotten good enough to think of advanced (non-beginner) type projects. Any ideas you can send my way would be appreciated. I’ve been using a program called Rosegarden for some of the basic stuff, but my experience with Renoise is that I can fly when I get going, and it will improve my project completion speed 10x if I can get it into the process.

2

Well, after some experimentation, I answered my own question.

Solution #1 is working for me. I have four tracks in four MIDI channels going into the Aeolus synth.

In attempting Solution #2, I found that a.) I could use a new Linux program called Swami to extract soundfonts and that b.) the sound quality of many fonts is generally not up to the level of software synths.

I’d still like to be able to add my own sets of pipes. Any way to trigger more than one note from a single column, other than premixing the voices and loading as an instrument?

3

this is currently not possible in Renoise’s sampler.

it is possible to load the samples in an advanced sampler (such as Native Instruments Kontakt) and relate them in groups or layers.

sample groups and layers will be a main parte of XRNI refounding which will be going to be completed during Renoise 2.x cycle

4

yes i cant wait for renoise 2,just to see how many of the great ideas gets implemented

5

a little notice:

I was talking about Renoise 2.x: Renoise 2.0 will probably not even have anything new on XRNI side; new XRNI features will probably be introduced in multiple steps after 2.0 release

6

i know that renoise 2,wont have all the great thigs implemented from the begining of version 2,but i still hope that some of the minor ideas like plugin delay compensation would be implemented in the begining :yeah: