Recording My Final Song With External Gear

Hi,

I use mainly external gear, synths and drum machine. What is, for you, the best way to record my “finished” song ? I can record a sample per track, but it means playing through the entire song for each input I have…

I’ve thought to use a sequencer like Reaper as the Main program, and Renoise in Rewire as the slave for all the sequencing and sample madness. What do you think ?

Forgive me as i want to help, however, have very little experience using external gear…I do use an external amp modeler for my guitar based tracks.

Why would you not just use Render to Song feature…as opposed to record a sample per track as u suggest…?

I probably don’t understand your question enough…but maybe you can help…

I also play and record each hardware piece one after another. Inside Renoise, there is simply no other way.
There was a discussion about a realtime render mode, the song will play at normal speed and recording all given inputs at the same time.
I can’t find it now.

Isn’t that the main drawback of Renoise? It’s not your typical Cubase/Kellog-Fruity Loops workstation. You could try recording a sample f.e. not per track, but per 16 ticks in a 64-tick track, but since Renoise doesn’t have a waveform preview, it will be hard to know whats going on at an exact moment.
Or try the rewire thing. you stated below. I mean, that’s how I’d do it if I had external stuff…

i have a similar setup, using a mix of external gear and software.

you will find that using Rewire is of no help here because:

  • if Renoise is Master you can use the slaved software only to playback signals, but NOT to record them (i have tried this with Ableton, not sure if it works with Reaper but i doubt it)

  • if Renoise is Slave you can record all your software-signals in the Master program easily, but you can’t record your external gear cos the physical hardware inputs of your soundcard are allways used by the Rewire master so you can’t access them from Renoise.

recording each hardware channel one after another is an option but very time consuming. for me this is of no use either since i never build an arrangement in Renoise, i live-jam all of my tracks and cut/arrange them afterwards.

what i do is i use an instance of the vst-plugin TapeIt2 in every channel that i want to record. this way i can record all channels at once but all seperately - i guess that’s what you’re looking for Daniel. it’s not freeware (19 US$) but it has an important function: Syncronized Recording on Midi start/stop, so all recordings start/stop at the same time which is important for arranging it later. don’t know if there’s another way of doing it but this way works very well for me.

I’ve used the freeware version of TapeIT but it has some limitations compared to TapeIt2.
But I’m just messing with music for my own ammusement so I just put TapeIt on the master-track and record the whole song.
So mixing and whatever “mastering” I’ve done is recorded as is.

But it would be nice with a better “record” feature in Renoise.

On a side-note: Some Soundcards come with a ‘record what you hear’ like function.
Like my Edirol UA-101.
But when I render the song inside renoise it sounds much better, but it’s great for quick song sharing with my bandmates.

this would also be a very useful feature for linux users… several great linux synths work only as standalone programs that you have to route through renoise using JACK. Essentially what you get is the same as if you were using hardware synths… I’ve been recording these tracks into smaller 4 to 8 bar samples so that i can reuse and reorder them… I agree though that it would be nice to have some sort of render feature for these.