Pitch Command

What about having a command ot change the pitch of a sound?
It can be easily done if you have a single sound in an instrument, fair enough.
But what if you have a drum kit or if you’ve sliced a beat to an instrument and you want one of your sound to play at a different pitch evry time.
I.e: The kick in a drum kick plays at a different pitch on each beat.

You can’t use the 05xx, 01xx or 02 xx as they move to a pitch, they don’t change straight away.

i think someone (byte-smasher?) suggested a dsp that could do this for most types of input as a general solution.

i imagine that a command to affect sample-based instruments should sound better and cost less CPU than a DSP… as it just changes the speed the sample is being read… there is no real math involved such as in realtime pitch shifting

ye, maybe i should have said built-in device instead. the point was that one device could handle it all. the implementation could differ internally depending on which type of instrument that is used, i guess.

Finetune pattern command. We should stop limiting ourselves to FF in this area.

I just use 01xx and 02xx for this, and temporarily change the TPL to 1.

If it’s really important that the TPL is not 1 at that very moment, it’s very easy to just create a new instrument for that sample and repitch it that way.

I was about to write the same thing:

05xx + F201 will transpose the pitch imemdiately:

C-4 01 ---- ----  
E-4 01 F201 05FF  

if you need to transpose for more than 16 semitones, you can add more command columns:

C-4 01 ---- ---- ----  
E-4 01 F201 05FF 05FF  

ah, thanks for the tip. kind of arcane (or maybe i’m just stupid) though i guess but maybe that’s in the FM somewhere? (=

Thanks for the tip, but wouldn’t it be much faster to have one single command?

you only have to set F201 once, so in the end it’s like you are using a single command.

the real limit of this approach is that F201 limits the granularity of all tick based commands so, if you for example want to change the pitch of a sample immediately on a track and gradually on another track at the very same moment, this technique is unusable.

however, at any time you can revert to default (12 ticks per row) with F20C, and can use any value between 00 (song stop) and 10 (16 ticks per row)

the general idea behind Renoise commands and DSP is to avoid to add features which solve genre specific problems.

take for example the Signal Follower: many people asked for a Sidechaining device. we decided to add a more general feature which allows to do sidechaining and much more. in your case, 05xx lets you do immediate and ramping pitch value changes, so I would not expect a “change pitch immediately” command to be added in the future, just because having it makes certain tasks “faster” to accomplish

Then the only way I can take is to make a new sample instead of a drumkit and use that one, I can’t touch the ticks per line as I use shitloads of retriggers…
Not a big deal.

Wow! Thanks for that guru tip =)

Until something else is figured out, I just thought I would share a technique that I use quite often.

Assuming the instrument is something relatively simple like a drum kit, or a loop which is broken down into a few sliced up sections, and not something ridiculous that has a million bajillion different samples in it…

When you map the samples in the instrument, don’t use the ‘standard’ method, which might be something like this:

  • C-4 = kick
  • C#4 = snare
  • D-4 = clap
  • D#4 = highhat
  • etc.

Instead, map each sample to its own octave, so you get something like this:

  • C-0 to B-0 = kick
  • C-1 to B-1 = snare
  • C-2 to B-2 = clap
  • C-3 to B-3 = highhat
  • etc.

A quick example using Renoise’s basic “kit808” drum kit:
http://illformed.org/temp/dblue-kit808-pitched.xrns (Renoise 2.0 XRNS file)

This isn’t a perfect solution, but it does at least give you a wider range of possibilities. You can even spread the sounds out differently, so that some are occupying multiple octaves if that’s what you need. Just use a bit of creative thinking and arrange everything in a way that works for you.

You’ve also got to be aware of the fact that you only have 10 octaves to play with, so depending on what you’re doing you might not be able to fit everything you want in there. For me, it’s not a big deal to break down a larger instrument into a few smaller ones if necessary.

Another silly example with the amen break:
http://illformed.org/temp/dblue-amen-pitched.xrns

.

Just transpose the note? This surely should change the pitch?

This suggestion would achieve this, but only as a pattern effect command.

devices don’t have direct access to samples, so if you pitch upward, where does it get the rest of the sound from when it reaches the end of the current period?

I just wanted to bump this thread to say that I really think this would be a great addition to Renoise. Actually, it’s probably the single improvement I’d most like to see added.

I can see the suggestions and workarounds that people have suggested in this thread, but they’re not exactly neat or elegant, if you ask me. It would be really nice to have a single, specific command added for changing the pitch of sliced samples.

I also don’t think the argument that it’s “genre-specific” really holds up - in what way is the ability to control pitch and slicing simultaneously specific to a particular genre, e.g. breakcore? Granted, it is a classic breakcore sound, but I don’t make breakcore or anything like it, and the feature still appeals to me. Plus, ultra-tight control of samples definitely seems to be one of Renoise’s Unique Selling Points - which, for my money, ought to include something like this.

Well, I hope the devs will consider the case for this. Thanks for reading, in any case, and apologies for the bump!