i hardly ever use vst(i). i occasionally play with the vsts, but i prefer to use samples. i like employing the character that a sampled sound has. sampling vinyl sounds terrific (and no vinyl vst comes close).
I think just the opposite way - A synth has much more character. Samples are just recorded sounds of something, while VSTi creates it’s own sound.
I prefer synths, although for more complex solos which require tracker-ish control over samples I use sample leads.
no need to argue about it, the cool thing about Renoise is that you can use samples or VSTi 
Part III:
Generally, I try to keep an ‘open mind’, try new things and not be stubborn. A lot of former trackers from the ‘golden days’ who started with Amiga Protracker or PC Scream Tracker now use Soft Studios like Reason or FL Studio to compose their songs. I think “It is 2004, not 2000 and certainly not 1995, am I using out-dated software?”
So this morning I read Computer Music’s beginner guide on Reason and FL-studio. I had made a song on my Yamaha Synth, and recorded the notes into all 3 programs (including Renoise) and checked out the editing capabilities, the sound, ease of use…ect
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Reason is cool. It has good sound banks, a very cool interface, and a piano-roll style of editing notes. Checked out all the machines. This program is way overhyped.
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FL Studio (formerly fruity loops) is dope. For a program that seems to have some basis in trackers (minus the actual ‘tracker’), it’s pretty comfortable to use and has some nice toys like ‘plucker’. The sounds that came with it didn’t sound as good as Reason.
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Renoise. After playing around with the ‘SoftStudios’, I went into the world of Renoise. I played my yamaha, and used a small 99K vsti called mdajx10. I got the best sound out of Renoise by far. Renoise is far from outdated, it’s actually up-to date. Then I put a delay and Reverb, and I was so happy. Edited the song a little. I was like, “hell yeah”, I prefer Renoise 10x over that other sh!t!!!
vstis do allow you more control over the sound you craft (i use synth sample generators for this, remember SUBSYNTH!? 
)
but the sound is ultimately still just pure digital. by character and quality i meant the less deliberate stuff, like record pops and warps, and the seasoned sound of old tape, atmospheric sounds from the place where the recording was made. sampled tones just have this ability to sound so warm 
. sampling is what i’m all about.
So for you character means low quality sound recorded on outdated devices? ( 
)
I know the warmth, but I don’t get people who say that vinyl is better because of the pops. It sounds stupid for me. No offence.
But anyway, if you want warm sound, use some good hardware. Some people put the digital sound through some pre-amps and other stuff to make it warm. I can understand such things. But sampling vinyls for pops and tape for the noise is… weird. 
Samplers are the main dance music production tool…it’s a common misconception from newcomers that synths are the primary production tool, and that samples are cheating. (It’s not, not if you’re sampling atomic bits and bobs like a drum hit or a tone.)
Exactly…samplers can convincingly mimic synths in most areas.
I disagree. A synth has infinitely less character than a sampler, IMO. Subtractive synthesis is all about basic waveforms i.e. simple sounds, which is why for the most part all synths sound the same and they so often produce cheesey sounds!
For me, the only real advantage a synth has over a sampler is that it’s oscillators are generating the waveform, which prevents aliasing…and the odd useful thing like PWM, or the ability to detune dynamically. If you’re only using the sound across a couple of octaves (which is the only range that synth tones usually sound good across anyway), you don’t need this feature and a sampler will do fine. IMO, subtractive synths are generally good for two things; bass and bleeps…they tend to suck for leads unless they’re distorted to all heck.
Your sampler is like a synth which isn’t restricted to just this handful of basic waveforms. With careful looping or a tone catching plugin, you can create and manipulate tones in a sampler which no subtractive synth can possibly emulate, and would be impractically difficult to program on an FM synth. And these are harmonically rich, complex, organic tones, not clinical and clean stuff like a synth’s waveforms. If you’re feeling oldskool, you can sample and seamlessly loop the tone of a rich-sounding chord from almost anywhere and walah, instant rave lead (if you like phat and ravey leads, as I do).
Most people don’t bother to make their own tones because they can’t be bothered mucking around in their audio editors finding good loop points (or don’t know the quicker ways of getting tones out of samples, like those offered by a couple of plugins). With Renoise, you’re already ahead of the competition in this respect, because:
- The Renoise “internal sampler” has a built-in sample editor, making sample editing so convenient you don’t even have to change apps.
- The sample editor has a loop tuner, letting you loop the fundamental timbres out of some random mp3 you’ve loaded into Renoise with ease. (Got some really lovely stuff out of Evanescence - Bring Me To Life the other day, because it’s so harmonically rich.)
- The Renoise “internal sampler” lets you ping-pong loop a tone you’ve loop tuned, which is superior to forward or backward looping a sample when you’re dealing with tones. (This capability was key to the oldskool Prodigy sound, where Liam used it a lot on his Roland W30. He bragged that he could loop a fart and ravers would dance to it…)
This is exactly what makes a tracker superiour to editors like cubase.
You can move and shape samples in a lot more directions than cubase can and against MIDI-editors, trackers will always remain superiour. Yes, you have all these special midi commands you can use, but it also depends if your equipment supports it, in most means, you have to spend a lot of cash for quality MIDI equipment to reach the same waveshaping you can also simply do in Protracker.
Most of the effects you cannot apply to VSTi’s either and in some cases for me this is a true pain in the ass.
but I let this guy here the song I had made in Renoise and he said, “wow, great sound quality. it sounds like you Normalized it. Did you?”
and I said, “uh…? I’m not sure” 
I remember in Modplug when I’d render my .IT files to .WAV, it would Normalize it afterwards.
Now when I render in Renoise, does it Normalize the output, and Is this even important ? 
Normalizing means changing the volume of the song so the maximum
during the song reaches a certain given treshold. Basically, the directly
audible result of that is the same as you turning the volume knob.
Which you can’t hear without comparing to another playback…
So the next time your friend throws a word at you that you don’t understand,
I suggest you ask him to explain what he means, or don’t believe him 
ever listen to aphex twin?
and how can your synth stack up against me snagging a sustained couple bytes of classical horns. my sampling IS a synth. except instead of generating simple waves and f****ing with pulse width modulation and lfos, i pick a complex wave out of nature and use renoise’s effects stack, and lfos. a synth starts to look more like a tool for purists. and i’m not one of those when it comes to sampling. i wouldn’t cut a loop and mix synths over it and say done, but anything i can record is fair game to me.
Normalizing is something i rather don’t do. It only pumps up the amp but in a whole.
If i had to post-process a song, i use T-racks to equalize and limit output.
T-Racks is a pretty good tool for that occasion.
Yes. Rendering with the maximum possible volume in the first
place will retain more dynamics. But unless rendered to a really
low volume with less than 24bit quality I doubt anyone would
really notice. With 32bit floating point rendering and normalizing
afterwards, the quality loss is the same as of adding an additional
gainer on the mastertrack… Not really a problem 
But if you render as 16bit with the max volume at, say, 25% or -12dB,
you’ve effectively lost 2 bits of dynamics, giving 14bit quality.
Normalizing afterwards won’t give you back those bits…