So pitchwheel messages are poorly tracked, but...

Is it possible to record such actions into a sample?

For example, record the output of one track with my live pitchwheel movements onto a fresh new sample?

So, you’ve recorded some pitchwheel movements and want to “apply” this to a different sample?

Meaning, your patterns have a bunch of MIDI pitchwheel messages, which look like this:

C-1 01 M1 4000
--- -- -- ----
--- 01 M1 7600
--- 01 M1 7F7F
etc...

If this is the case, then you can simply swap the instrument number (column containing 01 in my example) and replace it with your desired instrument.

You don’t have to do this by hand BTW. - use Advanced Editto swap instrument number throughout the track/pattern/song…

If you want to apply the pitch changes to the sample itself, simply render it…

Thank you for your reply and the link, I actually learnt something indirectly as a result.

But to be more clear, what I am asking is, can I live record sounds coming from an instrument audio into a sample?

For my purposes I’m specifically asking because I want to capture my pitchwheel performance, just as if I were recording it as audio in a ‘normal’ DAW.

Haha, cool. Yes, I always try to answer in a way so that, even when I get it wrong, it’s at least somehow useful :slight_smile:

Well, to record noodlings in realtime you can stick a recording plugin of some kind into your track DSP chain.

Just make sure that whatever sound you’re looking to record is being passed through that track (obviously).

I’ve just made a little experimentation with this.

Well yes I made it to recording my pitch bend to a sample in renoise. But it is…very quirky…I would not use it to actually make music the way it is…too many steps involved to set it up, too many quirks to watch out for… Let’s just hope, the future of renoise will get better bend handling and audio track business, so this kind of thing is no problem any more.

I did it with some external software involved though, I used jack on linux to route a track’s output back into a renoise input. The track has a dc sample that is volume modulated by pitch bend. Sample recorder vst sounds fine for this, too. You could also use an external app to record your pitch bend signal.

To capture the bend as audio, I made a special instrument. I would have a sample that is outputting dc (a straight 1.0 line), and have it’s pitch bend mapped to a gainer modulating the dc. Then I made the dc sample autoseek, and placed a note at the start of the song, so it would always output dc when the song is playing. I need not say, when no note is playing, it won’t work, so it will not work when the song is paused? As written above, the track with dc is fed into a seperate output, and back into a renoise input, so it could be recorded as waveform. The waveform then is a sample, that can like the original dc track be sensed with a signal follower with the right settings, to modulate other things.

too many quirks to watch out for…

Such as?

quirks? here be some that I came up with while trying out the technique I described:

  1. you have to set up the whole game tediously…it is not really straightforward to do so…

  2. the modulation thing is bound to the dc instrument to be in action, it needs to output for the thing to work, so you need to play an autoseek note or hold a midi key for the signal to be active…

  3. recording in renoise or outside of it will be hard to synchronise…and when importing the audio for the bend signal to work as automation track via a signal follower, it needs to be manually cut/aligned/arranged, too, as well as the signal follower making the thing actually effect something will need to be reassigned to another track…

  4. I failed to make the signal follower generate a 100% aligned/correct signal, it will never reach 100% bend up when -6.020 db of the dc signal is aligned to 50% on the signal follower. In some use cases this might be undesireable, for example when it is impossible to put two sounds into exact phase on a bend up, because it cannot reach accurately 100%

  5. managing the bend track, and getting it into proper shape or correcting slip moments, makes the whole thing appear right next to my top list of stupidly masochistic things to try with only renoise…the sample editor and the way samples are arranged seem more than inconvenient to me for this task…I mean trying to actually make music involving this principle…

Maybe some things could be solved with a tool (setting up things, switching between live action, record and playback mode), or other things could be solved with another application set up and synced with renoise (another daw with proper audio tracks and “takes” management, and editing functionality, so the audio bend signal will reside within it fed back in sync into renoise). Or there might be some help found in a simple VSTi (like via some scriptable VST), that will generally output the dc signal all the time depending on the bend or other midi controller status.

Maybe just take the whole idea thing as motivation for the future of renoise, to rethink the ways the automation graphs/recording and possible audio clip arrangement could work.

I would not use it to actually make music the way it is

Hm, no I (probably) agree - haven’t tried your particular approach, but capture tweakings as audio data sounds a bit too “monolithic” for my taste :smiley:

Something else, which could also be considered a workaround is to use xRules to e.g. convert PB to record high-res automation for the selected parameter.
You still need to perform some steps, but quite easy to set up - let me share an example later tonight.

Edit: my internet connection was flaky that night, and then I forgot. Oops :smiley:

I was playing around with this earlier.

If you increase the LBP for the section you want to capture pitchwheel performance to like 64, the pitchwheel records satisfactorily.