As the longstanding campaign by DJ Terrabyte have reminded me, the ability to play any position of a sample in any pitch is pretty useful when you want get creative with long recordings.
I’ve found the following trick (which is possible from Renoise 3.1 and onwards) is a nice workaround, which comes close to achieving the original goal while providing some benefits of it’s own.
So, enough talk. How does it work?
The first thing you should do is to select an empty instrument and load a long sample of some kind.
Next, head into the phrase editor, add a new phrase and make it look like the following
Enable the sample column (CMD/CTRL+SHIFT+K) and type “01” in the sample column
The number 01 will make the note reference the second sample in the instrument - or, in our case, the first slice. Which doesn’t actually exist yet.
Next, we want to add a slice marker. This is really just a question of switching to the waveform editor and selecting the slice tool.
Once the slice is added, you can now play the sample in any pitch, while moving the slice marker around.
That’s all there is to it. Triggering the slice via a phrase with sample columns makes the whole thing possible.
Granted, this is just one phrase and one slice. But you can add a lot more - I think the maximum number of phrases is 126 - and have instant access to them all by switching phrase (or via program change messages). To further streamline this process you can use my phrasemate tool (link in signature) to batch import/export phrase presets.
uhm… wait… 