I’m becoming increasingly more interested in how to produce textural sounds (as in bit1 or Flying Lotus).
What techniques can be used within Renoise to produce such sounds?
Here’s for wishing I had the ability to reverse engineer songs, and pick apart the samples & effects.
i know artists such as flying lotus use alot of heavy parellel proccessing, so taking a loop duplicating it and processing one verison leaving the other dry, weather this be heavy compression or distortion, also sidechain compression, making the elements of the track pump ( used heavily by flylo)
also, lots of tape saturation never hurts 
Golly gosh I could write a doctoral thesis on this subject area. Given that I’d rather be making the noises myself rather than talking about them, I’ll refrain from the task.
I suggest everyone do the same. Just go nuts with experimentation. Tweak, tweak, tweak and tweak some more. Morph. Sample. Blend. Melt. Blur. Get oblique. The more work you put into your own experimentation the more you’ll develop a signature sound. Reverse engineering will only get you so far. Journey to new fields, graze on pasture unexplored. No texture for texture’s sake. Make it serve a higher purpose, make it work to a thematic purpose.
Thanks for the responses!
I’m by no means attempting to release any mimetic music. But understanding other artists’ techniques is the most effective way for me to grasp basic concepts. From the basics, I can take sounds in all kinds of ridiculous/personal directions. For example: the tutorials included Renoise taught me how to use pattern commands when I was just starting out. I assume that (likewise to retriggers/mixing/bends/etc) producing sonic texture is also a learned technique, at least to an extent.
I’m simply searching for a starting point. 
i’d say do not focus solely on Renoise either. i use Audacity for sample-editing as well, because it has some other effects (through free plugins) that i enjoy. if you just check out all of the free sound-software out there (CSound, Coagula… i’m at work can’t remember the other ones), there are a couple (Coagula!) that can do sick shit and make sounds you didn’t expect. as MMD said, experiment.
There’s a free unlimited timestretch VST fx which is great for turning any samples into original textures. Grab it here:
what’s going on in the beginning of this commercial?
from 00:03 to 00:08
o1pqbPi_Y20
Whatever it is, it’s full of emotion.
Interesting, the timestretch plug-in seems to work in Linux natively. I tend to shy away from external plug-ins (except for those available in the 2.6 beta) for Renoise, since so much can be achieved natively. On the other hand, I had a tendency to abuse VST’s in other DAWs, since they seemed a bit limited. Perhaps I should get back into pd.
pd/max is pure experimentation and learning about sound and dsp. I really encourage all of you to learn that software & use that in Renoise. Renoise + DSP software = the sky is the limit.
And Max/MSP/Jitter is A LOT of fun
Do it man! there’s an awful lot to be done by just automating pd from renoise, especially with the examples they include. also many of the effects in the ladspa sets are great! and they integrate with renoise very nicely. (Renoise + pd + Alsa Modular Synth + ladspa)/Jack = linux experimental heaven