Just thought I’d be positive, and say 'Renoise is a good thing, and to make a good song in it is very cool."
Yesterday, I decided to teach my little brother the FL Studio program since I had bought a ‘computers and music’ magazine which teaches you how to learn the program.
He said, “Is it better than Scream Tracker?” and
I laughed and said, “It depends on the person using it and their skills. If you look at it, FL is influenced by trackers.”
(maybe not influenced enough, but they knew about trackers, it utilizes .XI instruments, buzz machines, pattern based music production.) granted it’s piano roll but such will be included in RNS1.5.
I then said, “Let me show you what I use.” and I opened up Renoise with a cool beat that I had made the night before. It sounded good, and he had respect for the Renoise program. Granted when you first open it, it looks overwhelming with notes all over the place like:
“C#4 01 52”
but if I have to make a complicated song with depth, I like having that much power. It IS harder to learn to track, and it’s not for everyone, but its what I respect.
oh, and then our mother told us, “Its late. Cut that music off and go to bed!”*
*(actually she said in german, “Du muSS jetz zum bett gehen.”!)
Oh my God! And have you seen the mouse?? I love it!!
But Exacto, d’you really think that learning to use a tracker is more difficult than a usual roll sequencer?
Because I’m god-damn-stupid and once you say that it’s hard to learn tracking, I feel intelligent somehow
I used Piano Roll in Fruity Loops before I got into tracking. I don’t think any of these is more difficult to learn, but I can’t live without the nice hexadecimal numbers, pattern effects and stuff. I generally find tracking more suitable for me, but I always repeat - it’s a matter of taste, and I think some people might find different things easier.
to answer the question,
-no I never used PianoRoll. I started with ScreamTracker and IT. It’ll be interesting once Renoise gets pianoroll, I’d like to try it out, but I’m not even worried about that right now.
yeah, what i dug the most about the different screens for all the functions was that you could “tab” your way through all the options. i like to track in an easy-chair with the keyboard in my lap, it still really cramps my style when i have to balance the mouse on my leg to go do something.
Yeah, i indeed liked using the keyboard on my lap…
I got pretty far that way in renoise until i wanted to select a block…
I also have to take care that i select or deselect copy options from the tracks (effects, instrumentno’s, automation etc.) but when i got that in my fingers this works pretty neat copying just only what i need.
I had it pointed out to me recently that there’s too types of easy:
Easy to learn how to use
Easy to use once you’ve learnt how to use it
IMO, Renoise has an initial steep learning curve, but once that’s breached, I think that it’s much easier to use (in terms of convenience and getting stuff done quickly and efficiently) than a lot of software out there that’s easy to learn.
And if we`ve done our job well, 1.5 will be much much easier to use for newbies and more powerfull to use for experts with nearly the same amount of features.
Lets see …
today at my job, this guy brought in his demo CD. He used a kurzweil keyboard and Cakewalk. The music sounded very much like ‘blues’, but it didn’t have that ‘hell yeah’ quality to it.
I think that’s a point. A lot of users care more about effects than making it sound good. I hear better Reason/FL/MT2 songs out than Renoise songs, and its not because Reason is a better program, its because sometimes Renoise users focus too much on pushing the effects/DSP rather than making a good song. So I think its all about making a good song!
The definition of a good song is subjective, but you probably aim on the use of samples and the finishing touch.
It’s something that can be done as good as in Renoise as in any other application.
Yes, Agree’d. Renoise can do the ‘finishing touches’ very well and make some great songs. One of the things than makes it so powerful.
Now with Samples, I used to RIP them in IT. I can still Rip them now from XM files but since renoise can utilize higher quality samples than XMs, maybe the .XIs are mono or lower sampling rate. Does anyone have any good sources for high quality samples? (I got the MAZ CD, but I need a better library) maybe we could build one.
People release MP3s instead of RNS files. (this is the reason I only have maybe 5 RNS files that weren’t created by me!)
So if there’s a cool song in MP3, you can’t open it up anymore and examine it like “tempo is 130 bpm, rip the kickdrum sample”
Samples are dead, long live VSTi. I used to rip and use a lot of samples in the old FT2 days, but now, with all those quality freeware VST synths and soundfonts around, I find it totally pointless. From my once huge sample library, only drumloops survived. Check out www.kvr-vst.com for lots of good freebie synths and you might find you don’t need samples anymore.
Edit: BTW, the VST plugins are the main reason people don’t release RNS files. As you cannot legally distribute plugins with your music, the only reasonable option is to render the song down and release as MP3.
The problem with most old samplepacks (mono or stereo) is that they mostly don’t come above 22Khz.
The sounds are pretty well possible to enrich in Renoise but with certain samples i really had to render the song 96Khz 32bit to be able to have some warm sounds.
I still don’t like this thin canned sound that also comes forth from FT II. The way samples are bitwised played can make a difference in sound warmth and this is why i like Polytracker and Impulse Tracker above FastTracker, since they both play the lo profile samples a lot better and warmer.
Why RNS songs aren’t shared is because good quality sounds come in a lot of cases packed in vsti’s which are either large themselves or the samples that are in them are large.
Good samples are played very superb in Renoise, but these samples are huge, i have em but i’m not eagering to share those RNS because of the songsize and the requirement of various VSTi’s
Yes, VSTi’s has more or less replaced samples entirely. But not when it’s about percussions. I have searched through every VSTi at www.kvr-vst.com, but still percussion samples in WAV is lot better. There are not many percussion-instruments in VSTi’s anyway.
When VSTi support was implemented in Renoise I was thrilled. I thought anything I did sounded so cool, crisp, fat and … awesome. But recently I’m starting to miss the control you gain when using samples. What I like to do is to use basic sine, square, triangle and saw waves and use the internal filters, distorsion, lfo’s, etc and make my own little “synths”.
This allows me to use sample offset, glide, vibrato, etc…
What especially pisses me off when using vsti is that if you’re for example using an instrument with a filter envelope, it’s not reset when you hit a new note… this is probably adjustable but it seems to me that every vsti works in different ways and it’s a real pain trying to remember everything.
What I would like to do however is to buy a huge synth like Big Tick’s Rhino, delete all other vsti’s and only use this one vsti to really get to know how to operate it.
Alternatively I would like renoise to evolve into some kind of integrated tracker/soft synth with a super enhanced instrument editor but I’m not sure if this would be the ultimate solution.
No I don’t think samples will die any time soon. I still use samples for percussion, sound fx, vocals and general wackiness. Just look at all the ‘vsti’s’ released today that come with huge banks of, yes, samples.
I do agree about sample control phonkey, wish there was a way to control vsti’s the same way universally.
maybe we could build one.