I’ve been thinking about the concept of an arranger lately and I’ve decided that it’s too limited for a program as powerful as Renoise. My reasoning is that the more tracker-like way to do things would be to alllow users to embed sub-patterns in special instruments.
This topic has been brought up before, but just think of the possibilities:
- Pitch-able, loops could be created that would act as arpeggios
- As an option, these arpeggios, like in most synths, could progress through whatever chords are being played at the time
- When the pitch of these loops change, the tempo stays the same
- Instruments could now layer samples
- Instruments could now contain DSP chains… one for each sub-channel in the sub-pattern
- Pattern effects could affect all samples playing in the sub-pattern, including 0Bxx which could reverse the entire pattern playback
- Sub-patterns could either loop or act as one-shot instruments… and they’d all be affected by instrument envelopes, LFOs, and filters
These are just some of the possibilities offered by this approach that a standard arranger wouldn’t even come close to covering.
I CAN HAS A TRAMEN?
… I really just chose the topic to stimulate controversy 
… the arranger alone won’t allow me to non-destructively create a whole bunch of drum loops and play them like a piano in different pitches… or to do the arpeggio trick