does anyone know what made the roland r8 special and how it’s features could be replicated in renoise?
humanize, randomize etc
12 Bit samples. In the time of soundtracker, (1989). I think it has much to do with the tracker phenomena, that this happened alongside it.
As far as I know, there’s a compander style algorithm that means it stores samples at 8-bit, but they’re expanded back out to 16-bit or whatever on playback. How much this contributes to the sound is probably pretty debatable.
It’d be very tedious to replicate what the R-8 does with Renoise, at least for the sounds with a ‘nuance’ parameter. These sounds are internally split into higher and lower frequency components so you can emphasise highs/lows with different nuance values to simulate hitting drums/cymbals/whatever in different places.
Sounds with nuance also allow you to set separate decays for the higher and lower components. But the part that makes it tricky to replicate is that if you change the pitch of sounds with nuance the upper and lower parts aren’t pitched by the same amount. The sound changes dynamically as you pitch it, rather than simply being the same sound getting faster or slower. For example, often when pitching down you’ll get notch filter type effects as the upper and lower frequencies are ‘pulled apart’. I didn’t find anyone mentioning this aspect of its sound before I got an R-8 but it’s pretty clear if you look at the spectrum whilst using it.
The randomisation etc. isn’t really anything all that special in itself, it’s more the way the sounds can be tweaked. It kind of feels halfway between a drum machine and a synth at times and there are so many variations on many of the sounds that just downloading static samples from it doesn’t give anything like the full picture.
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I have a Roland R8m with the 909 card , it’s one of the punchiest drummachines ever and midi is tight as fuck ( from a cirklon 2 )
All I can say is that most of the samples are made out of 2 parts , one containing the bottom end and another for high freq content .
Get one second hand while you can
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