I like to use renoise as a one step at a time step sequencer by mapping the play current line command to a footswitch. Then I can trigger notes, phrases, program changes, automation stuff, control my guitar pedals, whatever, all from a single footswitch leaving my hands free to play keyboard or bass or whatever. My whole setup is based around this premise.
Lately, I’ve been playing with synchronizing phrases in this context. If I trigger a line with 2 phrases they will be synced, but if I want to bring in a third phrase on the next line, its almost impossible to get them to sync. This is how I discovered the ghost note trick as a work around, where you make empty phrases for each instrument and trigger them all on the first line. Then when you want to bring in an actual phrase, you put it in without the instrument number so its just the note letter, octave number and zxx command. Then all the phrases will sync up.
That’s all great, but now I want to midi sync some outboard gear to it. The phrases are synced up with the ghost note trick, but no midi clock is being generated because the song isn’t playing, and the song can’t play because my whole setup is based around the play current line command.
After reading a bunch, I tried feeding renoise from an external clock, and of course it starts playing the song when i start it, so I press stop in renoise but I leave the clock running, and I notice that renoise is still receiving clock ticks. So I trigger some phrases and they do in fact follow the incoming clock. All I need from here is to be able to filter out the start message from the external clock to renoise, which luckily was easily done from the clock side of it, as well as set the clock to start on a cc message from renoise. So now, I have all my empty phrases and the start command for the external clock on line 1, when I play that line it syncs all my phrases to eachother and to the external clock, and starts my outboard gear and everything is locked together, all while the renoise transport remains stopped, so im still free to use play current line to step through my patterns.
So its sort of turning the pattern editor into a phrase sequencer, and bypassing the renoise transport and internal midi clock. I realize this won’t be useful to many, and probably sounds dumb to most, but its all in the context of using play current line to manually control a bunch of stuff with my foot while simultaneously playing other stuff with my hands. In that way, its become indispensable to me for live use. Long live renoise!
