Samples, Instruments, Sheet Music

Help, Support & Bugs Beginners Questions - Renoise
1

Hi, some questions of a newbie,

I just read the quickstart guide and tested some of the video tutorials to get a first impression. Before I go on reading the manual here some questions:

  1. first I thought that pitch and tone length should be completely unconnected and wondered how the program solves that problem with the fixed samples. Now I got the impression that when using samples the pitch is indeed changed by speed of playing, is that correct ?

  2. Then I saw that using an instrument there is a collection of samples at certain intervals, hence the tone pitch is not just changed by speed of playing but also by switching to other samples. Though I don’t want to mix samples and instruments here, since this envelope story is in some way connected to instruments.

  3. I plan to manually import some sheet music to renoise and to play around by using effects, sample commands and maybe doubling instruments or replacing them by new instruments. I hope that way I learn quite something about handling the program BUT

  4. Despite some guitar sounds there are no real instruments available. There are some free VST instruments available, I read, through internet. I would like to have a piano, violin, transverse flute, bongos, a beautiful organ (non-synthetic), a bass guitar, duduk (kind of flute), a bagpipe…

  5. What are the quality differences between instruments / samples ? Differences between free and commercial versions ? How are they built up ? How to connect commercial versions of instruments with Renoise, any kind of problems to be solved regarding this issue ? Make single samples any sense, when you want the abilities of an whole instrument ?

  6. Later on I want to refocus on more synthetic music, but first I want to handle the old ones…

  7. Last questions: is Renoise able to transform the main parts of the pattern editor to old-style sheet music ? I read that Cubase is able to do so, if I remember correctly.

Thanks a lot for your help,
Martin.

2

I’m completely new to Renoise/tracking in general myself, but from what I know so far I can answer some of your questions.

  1. Thanks for the idea. I think I will transcribe into Renoise some songs I already know how to play on the piano.

  2. Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra is a free orchestral sample library.

  3. Instruments are a collection of samples. However, instruments have quite a bit more details about the samples it contains. Like position on the keyboard, levels of velocity, loop points, and because they have an specific sound for each note, there’s more precision and accuracy in sound between octaves. With samples Renoise uses the one sample to generate the sound of the other notes.
    Quality depends on the source and equipment used to capture/record the sounds. So most of the time, commercial versions have more quality than free ones. You just have to activate/unlock your VSTi license and Renoise will be able to use it.
    BTW if you have got the samples, you can create your own instruments in Renoise.

  4. Not natively, but what you can do is save your track as MIDI and use another program to display it as sheet music. It might not be perfect but is something.