Hey all ! sorry for this kind of “listen to my life” post, but I’ve been reading Renoise forums for a few days now and it brought back some memories from my younger days.
I didn’t find an Introduction section or topic so this post will also contain some context about me.
First of all, even though I speak about my younger days, I’m only 26, but started music production when I was around 12, spending most of my times between my DAW (ableton live / logic at the time) and some french forums about music production.
I mostly produce electronic music, but I explored different kind of sounds over that time, mostly club-oriented: electro-trash, fidget-house, house, hip-hop, techno, rave, trance, breakbeat, drum n bass, minimal… I may forgot some. (I had different alias depending on the period, maybe some soundcloud/beatport/itunes links are still out there)
Growing up, I became a Software Engineer and, spending already a lot of time on my computer for work, stopped music production slowly.
Every now and then, I felt like I had to start again and tried, but it didn’t last long for different reasons: with all that time without producing anything, I lost my habits and I feel my level is a bit lower than it used to on some points, and have to re-learn basic features of my DAWs.
My last attempt at getting back at music production was focused on breaks music with techno sonorities and a touch of idm, but was a failed attempt because I felt pretty limited with drum programming. Actually not limited, but it took ages and what not that enjoyable.
A few days ago, I bought a new laptop and decided it could be time to start doing some music production again. For the reasons above, I wanted to try out Renoise, mostly to make my drum programming process more enjoyable since this is one of my favorite parts of the electronic music I listen to and can add a lot. The first few hours, I understood nothing and could barely place a note on the grid, when reading the forum, I understood nothing about vocabulary. I almost gave up, but decided to watch the beginner tutorial series of the youtube channel, which are amazing!
When I finally felt I grasped the feel of Renoise, I realized that this workflow what was I was always looking for, but without knowing it: with classic DAWs, I was stuck in some kind of “way to do”, really really conventional, even though it’s been years I’ve been looking to leave this aspect of my music to go to a more rough and natural form art, putting some of the “codes” in the trash.
With renoise, I finally feel that I can focus on what I like the most, and make what I used to find boring in my production process enjoyable, so I bought it after 1 day of experimentations, and it’s been 2 days I’ve been working on different ideas.
I now have a pretty advanced track ongoing, and hope that Renoise will also help me finish tracks, since I was always bored with adding details, but I feel it will be different now !
Also, it happens often in my life that I focus a lot on something I like for a few weeks and then leave it forever. It happens a lot with music production, so we’ll see if Renoise will finally make me stick to it again, and meet back with my passion…
Sorry for that long message, you can take it both as some love toward renoise, and my introduction post to this beautiful community.