Synthesizing Sound Inside Renoise

Hello everybody,

As I have grown to be tired of the preset sounds of various VSTs, and as I cannot bring myself to tweak endless number of knobs just to “see what comes out”, I thought to myself - why not generate sounds inside Renoise?

At first, I was looking at some VSTs that I feel more comfortable with - ones that help you make the sounds you imagine with ease.
The only one that got close to do that for me wes Glass Viper.
Finally, I can modify ADSR envelopes using ADSR envelopes (instead of knobs) and finally, I can see how each LFO affects the waveform.

But, still, I was unable to create nice sounds with it, even though I am in full control over the interface.

So I started an experiment:

  1. Hand-draw a waveform in Renoise sample editor
  2. Apply VST effects to this track.

So far, so good. I was able to create some nice phat sounds that sounded just like a full blown VTS synth, using some heavy VST effects.

Now, one obstacle presented itself - I would like to create multi-sample instruments, so that each key plays more than one sample. So that a second sample I hand draw, is going to be in fact, the second “oscillator”.

Is that possible?
What is your opinion about this approach? Is there a better approach you would recommend for creating sounds inside Renoise?

you cannot assign two samples to a single key, but I suggest you to do the following:

map each octave with a different sound wave, then use multiple note columns to play them together.

assuming you will use 8 octaves and 4 waveforms, map each waveform to a couple of octaves, then add 3 new note columns in your track.

Volià, your two octaves, four oscillators synth is ready!

play something like this for a 4 oscillators sound:

C-1 01 – | C-3 01 – | C-5 01 – | C-7 01 – |

the obvious and simpler-to-do option is to use multiple instruments, but the proposed solution, although harder to build up, is simpler-to-use and surely more inspiring.

You can also use 09xx, volume modulations and all the other tricks in order to change phase, amplitude, and so on

Thanks It-Alien,

I thought about something like that, but it is limiting.
I like the multi-instrument solution though. It has an extra benefit of having all the instrument envelopes and such, so its a more “advanced” oscillator.

I think the entire instruments area needs rethinking by the design team though.

we are aware of this and will take care of the redesign in a future update

along those same lines, I’d love to contribute some quality renoise instruments to the included library that comes with renoise. If we all did, then there’d be quite the included library with every release of renoise. :) Of all things though, im REALLY looking forward to an instruments redesign in the near(ish) future! Till then, im happy!

you can share your instruments now ,here:
http://www.loopproject.com/xrni.php

Thanks.
I noticed this thread is from about 4 years ago… :)
Say - I noticed that the vote for features in the backstage is not functional.
Did I miss something? If not, why not make it functional and let the real voting begin?

You know, as much as I like community driven software, and as much as I think that user contributed content can be good, I am not really sure I share this notion.

For two primary reasons:
I think that most if not all Renoise users are not using these instruments at all. Even VST presets are considered a somewhat “lazy” solution that is used by beginners (not that I support this notion, I love presets :) ) so in my opinion, the instruments provided with Renoise should just be a small batch, to help new users start placing some kick-hat-kick-hat notes.

Not so?

we have not been inactive during these years :)

although I’m really the first on Earth who would like to see XRNI redesign as soon as possible (I’m the topic opener, so…), I reckon that the redesign has to be done after some other redesign tasks without which the XRNI structure cannot be fully rethought, that’s why we didn’t do this already. Anyway, the status of this process is not at a blank start.

the voting session which is shown on the site is closed because it ended with a previous release.
We will open a new voting poll after we ended the must-do updates.