Several questions on slicing and utilizing breaks in Renoise

Hello all,

I purchased Renoise some time ago and played around a bit, but am trying to make a more earnest effort in learning about it. I have a few questions about chopping drum breaks specifically. If it helps or means anything, I came from Ableton.

Firstly, what I’m doing is dragging a .wav sample into the top right, going to the sampler view, and slicing approximately every 1/8 note. Once I’ve sliced it up, I right click and press “Render Slices to Phrase”.

My first point of confusion is that sometimes when I press a key (say, Q (which is C4?)) the entire break will play, and other times only a slice will play. I want only slices. I’ve begun selecting “Keymap” near the keyboard and phrase area at the bottom, thinking that would make the keys play just a slice but that does not always work either.

(?) What should I be looking at, or have checked off, to see when pressing a key would play the entire sample or just a slice of it, after I’ve sliced it to phrase? I go to enter notes in edit mode and it’ll either enter slices or it will enter the entire sample at various pitches depending on the key.

Secondly, when dragging in my amen break, I was easily able to speed it up to 165 bpm. Sounded awesome. However I have a break that is at 175 bpm, and was going waaaay too fast. It would play at normal speed at 87.5 bpm.

(?) How can I begin to match my break tempos up more accurately so that they match? Is there a “double the length” button, like Ableton? I pressed the sync tempo button to the left, but it did not seem to change anything on the 175 bpm break (but I’m sure that was me messing up).

Finally, do I need to always slice my sample to phrases to get them into the editing view? Or am I engaged in a totally arbitrary step? I am going off of a video on Youtube so I’m not sure what’s necessary vs. what others happen to do.

Finally, what’s the major difference between Space and Enter for playing? It seems to me like space is play whatever is in the Edit menu, and enter plays whatever is in the Phrase menu. Is there more to it?

Thanks to whoever read all of this, and especially to anyone that answers!

EDIT: Some more behavior that’s odd. my 175 bpm break only sounded appropriate in the phrase editor at 87.5 bpm, but then only played from the edit menu appropriately at 175 bpm.