haha, no man, i often program 4 patterns of 128 lines with different drum-patterns and copy those around, then go back in and change individual patterns because i hate repetition. so quite the opposite of what you suggest
i donāt really have any solid advice other than āexperimentā. pick drum samples that sound good to you, try and combine them. sometimes to combo does not sound so good. switch samples, try again. try to get away from standard rhythms. for āfunkyā stuff, you can use the delay-commands.
you have to remember you are working with a piece of software which does not hold your hand as much as Ableton or Reason do. a ātrack grooveā is simply a shortcut for putting delay-effects on samples. Renoise lets you go in deep and place the effects yourself. it is just a different, often more detailed approach.
Coming from a Step Sequencer for drum I would of thought a Tracker would be fairly easy to get your head around, as far as placement goes. As you have mentioned yourself Renoise does not have Groove-Per-Track and the Global Groove it does have can be more than a little confusing to get your head around (personally Iāve used it about twice ever.)
If you like Step Sequencers maybe give Cieās Tool a try?
Otherwise I believe there is also one for applying Groove to a single track using the Delay column on notes already entered (although Iāve not tried it.)
Otherwise trial and error and I have to admit getting a really good (especially jungle-style) beat in any program is something I have always really struggled with unless ācheatingā and cutting up an existing break.
12 lines per beat - for having ability to change style of drumming in different parts of pattern or even sequencing polyrhythms
[indent]- one line of sequence every 4 lines in track for syncopated beat
4 and 2 every other line per line of sequence for swing
one line of sequence per 6 lines in track for straight beat[/indent]
many tracks - few different kicks, toms, snares, percussions, hats and crashes
layers - about 10 different, finetuned samples per one hit (use sonogram to lay drum tails together in frequency domain and spectrum to lay transients together and use pitch bend to do both simultanously)
cuts - some hits come together with cutting tail of previous hits
sidechaining - loudness of drums lowers loudness of other tracks
equalization - drums equalized to linear levels on logarythmic scale with different slopes
[indent]- kick and toms - -6dB/oct to -3dB/oct
snare and percussion - -4dB/oct - -3dB/oct
hats and crashes - -3db/oct - 0dB/oct or more - use classic equalizer to keep or automatic matching filter to filter out partials[/indent]
dynamics - drums sorted into two or three velocity layers (aplitudes on spectrum for each drum in each group reaches same level, donāt care about levels on dBmeter)
transients - fade in attack and punchy peak few milliseconds later for each hit
reverb at threshold of audibility
panning
[indent]- kick and snare in the middle
toms, percussion, hats and crashes on sides[/indent]
slightly diffferent equalization curves for each channel (LR) to make the sound shaped in panorama on snare and hihats
lowpass at 1kHz for first 10ms of snare drum attack to make the springs noise beginning later like in real snare
multiband compression
[indent]- for equalizing decay of snare drum tail
for lifting snare tail in some ranges
[indent]- low range
[indent]
200Hz - 500Hz
500Hz - 1kHz
1kHz - 1,5 kHz
[/indent]
and at the time highrange
[indent]
1kHz - 5 kHz
2kHz - 4kHz
[/indent]
[/indent]
on drum sum track expansion under -18dB with 25% knee on range 1kHz - 5kHz to add kind of rasp
expansion on all range on some drums to adjust the tails length
[/indent]
a little bit of static flanger (no LFO) on snare with different, sequenced phases for each hit
few anharmonic sine oscilators with decaying amplitdues for simulating partials in range 500Hz - 2kHz
compensation of reducing amplitudes - when mixing two same loud samples containing noise you loose about 3dB of amplitude because of covering opposite phases; it does not occure when mixing partials that have same phases; in practice - when snare and kick play together it is necessary to boost snare range 3dB louder than level of the kick to compensate reducing partials; otherwise you get silent kick when played with snare.
Wow! Whatta!!!
Have fun!
Listen to exaples here or buy original MP3 (Finetuned Pitch Numbers) here.
Thanks allot. I dont understand how you can start with 4 lpb and then set it to 8, doesnt that change the entire feel of the drum pattern? How do you go about adjusting it so that it keeps the same feel?
Also thanks to everyone else I think I will have to just check out some more of peoples renoise files.
he expands every pattern, doubles the size and increases the resolution by setting the lpb to 8. if you just set the lpb to 8 it will play twice as fast, but if you expand the pattern to double the size it will be normal again.
yep, what rhowaldt says , thereās a tool which I use, that does this automatically for a complete song, it also keeps into account synced samples, doubling the settings so everything sounds the same as before.
There still are some issues with it in the current released version, regarding values in the delay column or pattern commands like speed settings & retrigger, but Mogue is working on correcting those issues.
Cool thanks but I dont understand how it worksā¦ I just made a simple kick on every beat pattern in a 4 lpb format and then I opened the tool set to 2 and clicked ākick itā and now I have 16 lpb and 253 lines per pattern! Do do you just double what you have?
Also, is there a way for future reference to just loop a portion of the pattern?
I think you need to give more details on what youāve done, because I donāt get some of the terminology, from;
to
, doesnāt make any sense. You probably clicked more then one time, or used another multiplier value then 2.
Lets say you put a kick every 4 lines in a 64 length pattern on lbp4, arbitrary bpm rate of 120. Using the tool, and running it with a multiplying factor 2, youāll get a 128 length pattern, lbp8 with the bpm remaining the same. Playing this newly generated pattern should sound the same as before.
Running the script one more time, youāll get closer to the results youāre describing, a lbp of 16, but the pattern length will be 256 and not 253! Maybe you didnāt look closely. So you either run the script twice with a factor 2, or once using a factor of 3. Either way, the important thing is that itāll sound the same as the slower programmed pattern, but now youāll have more resolution to put shit in between events and get your squarepusher on
Ok I got it working the problem is for some reason the default setting of 02 causes it to be quadrupled or something, you have to erase it and manually type 2 and then press enter.
I mean is there a way to just loop lines 1- 16 in a 64 lane pattern?
Just copy and paste lines 1-16. I know itās annoying to copy and paste every time you change something, but I canāt imagine how that would look in the pattern editor if it were to loop it.
Select the first 16 lines with the mouse in the pattern editor, press ctrl+c, than press ctrl+p (= paste continuously), this will repeat the copied selection across the pattern.
You can also copy the first 16 lines and use your keyboards f9-f12 keys to skip to pattern divisions and ctrl+v your selection.
You can also mouse select, hold left mouse button on the selection, till the pointer transforms a bit with a little icon dangling underneath, than press ctrl so the icon changes to a +, than drop it to paste the selection. There are probably more ways, but the ctrl+p thing is pretty sweet for this kind of repeating stuff.
@zardoz: seems to me like you should just go and learn to use Renoise and its various functions, have a little fun, experiment a bit, before trying to make complicated drum patterns. if copy-pasting stuff etc indeed needs to be explained, you might need to consider spending a little more time with the software before trying anything serious.
ā¦ Im not ātrying to make complicated drum patternsā I am trying to lay down a simple drum beat like I have been doing in Ableton and Reason for quite some time. I am finding the layout of renoise to be somewhat counter intuitive, especially when compared to using more of a drum machine in the past. It seems that try as I might, I cant create anything very good here and the I open up a different DAW and can get way more work done in way less time. However it has only been a fe weeks, Ill give it a bit longer.
Youāre using the word program when you mean something else?
A tracker programs a beat the same way a programer writes code. For all intensive purposes, he/she doesnāt tempo tap in ideas to the text editor. He/she systematically types it in with extreme attention to detail.
This isnāt slow. A programmer can rip through code with dozens of keyboard shortcuts, obscure and fast mouse gestures, cut, paste, compile, rinse, repeat. A programmer uses a plethora of tools to get the job done. The job is to type text into an editor and make it work.
Load a breakbeat sample. Over the years Iāve collected over a thousand of these. Basically something like the Amen (most cliche choice of a thousand)
Load up a drumkit. Over the years Iāve collected over a hundred of these. Basically something like an 808 (most cliche choice of a hundred)
Put a kick on Line 00 and Line 10, put a snare on Line 4 and Line 12. Repeat 3 times accordingly
Put a Send device on Track 01 -> S01
Put a Send device on Track 02 -> S01
Put a Bus Compressor on S01, Select one of the drums presets.
Put a bunch of hihats on Track 03, every 4 lines.
Lower the volume of the track in the mixer.
Put some effects on there, like delay and reverb.
Put a signal follower on Track 01, Connected to the Volume of track 02 to make the hihats sound more natural. (E.g. make shit up, rube goldberg machines are fun.)
Season to taste. Rinse and repeat.
The breakbeat creates the natural sound (itās a recording after all), the drumkit and hi-hats accentuates and drives, the sends + compressors makes them into a beat sandwich.
From here you can right click and āRender to sampleā (known as resampling?) and start again.
Hereās an MP3 that showcases the previous technique.
The first 20 seconds are 3 tracks. On their own each track sound like total crap.
The last 10 are the same 3 tracks played at the same time, with me waving a few automation parameters around and an unhealthy fetish for distortion. (Also total crap?)
cool stuff. Do you add any sort of swing or groove to individual tracks.
Also I am starting to think that renoise may have a specific place in my production but may not be the ONLY tool for each stage. I may go about making beats in reason on the drum machine and then importing them as loops into renoise for detailed editing.
Totally dig what youāre saying but iāve found renoise to be quite a bit of fun for recording live midi input. Generally i just let it run the full pattern length, record for a while, then cut and paste the best bar/few bars. This works for me, and i prolly will program a few tweaks and fills here and there by hand.
Renoise does have the slightly cryptic global groove setting, which is a pretty good advancement in the tracker world, but not the same as clicking on mpc, etc. quantize presets. Overall, āGrooveā handling in trackers prolly isnāt the best and certainly not straightforward. Or maybe, it is so straightforward that itās not so obvious or simple.
This can be accomplished on a per track basis with note delay and volume commands. I have made attempts at recording drum machines at various swing settings/styles into renoise and content masking out everything but volume and note delays and cutting and mix pasting that into other tracks. Have had varying degrees of success with this. Nowhere near 100%. But, after a bit of hand tweaking of values iāve come up with 3 or 4 of these sorts of āclipsā that i use sometimes to apply some magic mojo grooviness. thatās what i think iām doing, anyway
Does suddenly occur to me that a tool could handle a technique like this pretty well and could turn out to be useful if folks would invest some time to create little loops as presets for it. Wildly differing lpb needs and preferences would complicate things though, could be a bit superfluous since cutting and pasting is easy enoughā¦ but might turn out to be more organized and easier than having to open another instance of renoise to cut from, etc. Uhmā¦ before i veer any further off topicā¦
, thereās a tool which I use, that does this automatically for a complete song, it also keeps into account synced samples, doubling the settings so everything sounds the same as before.