I think there is a lot of good electronica type music written on Renoise. I was wondering if anyone else uses it for writing more “traditional” types of music - rock/punk/pop/folk? I would love to hear other examples of non-electronica (plus vox) done in Renoise if people could point me in the right direction. I have a couple of tracks I did quite a while back using Renoise here:
(both quite shoegazey/ 90’s MBV type stuff - both could benefit from some better mixing!)
Personally, I found it very quick and easy to sketch out some new tracks using the audio recording in Renoise. I think it’s a neat approach as long as drum machine drums fit the music OK…
I would be interested to hear other opinions on this - also thoughts on getting more “natural” sounding drums - I can think of a few ways - loading lots of different samples for each drum to be used interchangably - which could get quite confusing - or recording lots of different loops for the different changes from a drum machine - which might be better… Any other ideas?
I’m still figuring out how best to translate my style into renoise though. The biggest issue is that once I hit a “critical mass” of audio tracks on a track (which really isn’t even very many if the audio tracks are long), saving/autosaving just gets to be really cumbersome.
Not sure of the best strategy to get around this. Rewiring into reaper is a common solution, but I’d rather not split my CPU cycles/workflow over two DAWs if I can avoid it. I might try adapting my style to make more use of short snippets of audio, but to be honest I haven’t find the perfect balance yet.
These are so beautiful! Are they all done in Renoise? What did you see as the advantages of using Renoise for these vs the usual DAW approach?
What is the problem with saving (I guess it takes a long time - but how long?).
I guess I can see how the more loopy ones work, but I am intrigued by “The Road is Long” - for example - which sounds like Renoise might not really confer any benefits over Reaper, say, and might have some drawbacks? Did you record each phrase as a separate sample, or just have really long (whole-song-length, or whole-verse-length) samples?
I am experimenting with playing parts in by hand instead of adding notes to the chart to keep guitar bits from sounding off time so much. You can also experiment with adding and lopping off bits of silence from drum samples, playing with delay and humanize settings, and nudging the tempo in a subtle way. I do not have a finished technique for this yet, and it may turn out that there are no correct answers, that some tricks work better than others depending on the song.
As a guitarist i’m used to being able to record guitar tracks directly so i have actual, real sounding guitars… But for drums, i had to work on it a bit… PM me if you want my .xrni files of multisampled drumkits that i made and/or use.
Hello James
I am writing (and recording) my music completely in Renoise also.
You can listen to it HERE. Still a lot of things to improve since I am still learning but recording “traditional” music using Renoise is not a myth at all.
So far I am using VSTi to record drums but I’m trying to do it in a natural way (multichannel input from VSTi - bass, snare, hats, toms, overhead and room are routed to each own channel in Renoise.
For guitar double-tracking I usually record 3-5 takes into one single sample and then use Slices to mark the borders of each region.
I tried to export the complete project from Renoise into another “traditional” sequencer to work on Mixing and Mastering but the main disadvantage for me is that when I working in Renoise I am able to change anything on the fly without a need to render it again : tweak drums, change notes etc. So I have to be completely sure I am not going to tweak anything (mostly) before exporting to another DAW. But the problem is that I do that often, I never stop tweaking so I will stick completely to Renoise at least for a while
Delt and Alex, Thanks for posting links to your music - all sounding very good, and not easy to spot any looping. As a matter of interest, how big are you setting your loops for vox and guitars? Do you record 1 bar, 1 verse or the whole song as one sample?
Usually I am making my guitar and vocal samples 4,8 or 16 bars long which equals to one verse, chorus or a bridge part.
Also I always setting a track delay to something about minus 80ms and putting a slice a little earlier than the actual first beat should happen in a sample, so the sound will “flow” nicely into the beat without too sharp or cut attack.
Hi!
In the past, I used Renoise with sampled instruments to make a lot of progressive rock songs, and you can find them in chronological order here (sorry, the page is only in italian…)
If you have time, just listen to them and tell your critics and opinions!
I’ve recorded all the guitars inside Sample Editor. The drums were multilayered from Bob Clearmountain drum series, or came from Kontakt libs. Because I’ve been composing a lot with Fast Tracker 2.08 in the past, Renoise was my natural choice. And then I switched to Cubase.
I’m still using R from time to time but It’s more difficult for me, with every new version to adjust to keyboard commands and shortcut changes.
Anyway, It’s possible. Even, when it has more in common with DAWing then TRACKing />/>/>
Also, some of these tracks (my latest project) were created with Renoise first and then exported as MIDI/WAV to Cubase: https://soundcloud.com/liquorfixation
I have always used renoise for this stuff; it offers a totally new way to produce - and really freaks out people used to watching the music on screen! The only small downside for me is handling large files; but I generally cut them up into parts if needs be.
Revo11 - I really like your songs! The singer is awesome.
My basic, rock-band setup (for a long time):
Drums: Sample libs (mostly Bob Clearmountain libs in the past) and Steven Slate Drums 3/4 and sometimes sampled Korg Wavedrum
Percussion: Tamburines/Shakers (real instruments - mostly short sequences, looped)
Bass: Trilian, sometimes my Variax + octaver/Digitech Whammy DT
Guitars: Variax + POD X3
My Korg R3 plus several VST instruments (NI/Arturia) and samples from old E-64/Akai2000 libs (pads and synths)
Renoise is very useful tool for creating complex and sophisticated instrument’s tracks, but it takes some time to polish them.
I’ve remixed a rock song for my fellows this summer.They gave me a full package of trackings,i.e. -drum track,bass track,piano track,vocal track,except guitar track -they just don’t have it))All samples from there,plus i’ve added some layers with other samples to the kick,hat,and snare,and Synth1 acid melodic line in the middle of the song
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