The Renoise Newbies Feedback Thread

[prei26]

@planetm

I still struggle with assembling my patterns into a song, I clearly need to read some more…, I tend to have to undo things that appear ‘wierd’ to me, like if I delete a pattern, then renumber another one to the old number, my old pattern data reappears. Clearly there are sensible things going on here, but sometimes I’m surprised by what happens. What do the numbers mean, if they have no relevance to the playing order? Adding a pattern seems to copy the current one with the same number so I only ever clone. My statements probably sound ridiculous to more experienced users, but aim to demonstrate my confusion with this feature, clearly it’d help if I read the appropriate manual section, it’s just not entirely obvious otherwise. I get by, and I can get the results I need, but I’m most likely being inefficient.

The numbers are the ‘names’ of the patterns
Three 6s beneath each other would mean you play pattern 6 three times
I’m not sure if there’s somewhere where you can see which patterns you’ve got, because removing a pattern from the sequence doesn’t remove it from the memory.

if you click and drag on the line of the sequence box you can expand an option to give the patterns your own names, which is alot easier to handle.

if all your numbers get jumbled after a while, there’s a Sort Pattern Sequence option which automatically renumbers your patterns logically (the top pattern being 0, and then counting from there). You can get to this option by right-clicking in the sequence editor.

[It-Alien]

@prei26

The numbers are the ‘names’ of the patterns

you can also associate labels to the patterns:

quite frankly, I don’t get this whole subject about the difficulty of creating complex arrangements inside Renoise; I often compose orchestral songs which can be longer than 10 minutes, using more than 100 patterns.
ok, of course I have long experience with trackers, but I think that complex arrangements can be easily done in Renoise. I respect the point of view of people who find this task difficult, but honestly I don’t agree with them

[Marc_Shake (Marcel Schindler)]

ok, of course I have long experience with trackers, but I think that complex arrangements can be easily done in Renoise. I respect the point of view of people who find this task difficult, but honestly I don’t agree with them

I agree, it’s not difficult, once you manage, how this “pattern ↔ sequence” thing works. But for a complete noob it is not very obvious that a “pattern” is just a part of a “sequence”

[Marc_Shake (Marcel Schindler)]

@NeuRoTiX

I think that many newbies just hurry too much to release/publish their music (I remember this feeling but even learning to wait and finish the song is an important lesson coming up from experience)

Full Ack. I agree that many newbies install Renoise or similar and think: “Now I am a great musician”. Some of them quit, because they do not manage to RTFM and enter weird basslines or stuff like that.

[BotB]

@It-Alien

quite frankly, I don’t get this whole subject about the difficulty of creating complex arrangements inside Renoise; I often compose orchestral songs which can be longer than 10 minutes, using more than 100 patterns.
ok, of course I have long experience with trackers, but I think that complex arrangements can be easily done in Renoise. I respect the point of view of people who find this task difficult, but honestly I don’t agree with them

not much to say but: SAME HERE
my tracks are not 10 minutes long, but with the high bpm’s, tracks often have 100+ patterns
you can even LABEL the patterns to keep track (har har har) of where you are in your composition.

try to label different sections of the composition, so that you know what happens where

[Dainhumain]

@It-Alien

quite frankly, I don’t get this whole subject about the difficulty of creating complex arrangements inside Renoise; I often compose orchestral songs which can be longer than 10 minutes, using more than 100 patterns.
ok, of course I have long experience with trackers, but I think that complex arrangements can be easily done in Renoise. I respect the point of view of people who find this task difficult, but honestly I don’t agree with them

For tracker noobs its not as easy as you make it out to be am afraid, its fuking hard lol

[planetm]

@It-Alien

I don’t get this whole subject about the difficulty of creating complex arrangements inside Renoise;

Obviously, since as taktic said:

@It-Alien

many of us here (for sure the whole renoise-dev team) are long term Renoise tracking nerds. Often its hard to understand whats hard to understand when seeing and using this program for the first time.

and he asked for feedback from newcomers:

@It-Alien

what took a long time to understand what not, whats still a misery for you in Renoise and so on. What should be changed to make existing features more prominent and easier.

So all you long-term/expert users say “I don’t see a problem with this”, but a number of newcomers mention the pattern/sequencing issue. It’s true to say that every aspect of the program is fine if you RTFM, but much of renoise is easy enough to work out without resorting to the documentation, and with practice I have got the hang of using the sequencer.

When I first tried (and before reading the doc’s) some of the behaviour did seem very strange though. E.g. I click ‘add pattern’ but I get a copy of the previous pattern, so I delete the data from it, only to find it’s been deleted from the previous pattern too. It’s trivial to an experienced user, but I bet a lot of first timers have the same problem. RTFM is not a solution if you’re genuinely looking at improving ease of use as taktic’s initial post suggests.

[Jonas (Djeroek)]

@planetm

When I first tried (and before reading the doc’s) some of the behaviour did seem very strange though. E.g. I click ‘add pattern’ but I get a copy of the previous pattern, so I delete the data from it, only to find it’s been deleted from the previous pattern too. It’s trivial to an experienced user, but I bet a lot of first timers have the same problem. RTFM is not a solution if you’re genuinely looking at improving ease of use as taktic’s initial post suggests.

Agreed. Arranging isn’t intuitive from the get go, I struggled with the exact same thing when I first tried Renoise.
‘Sort pattern sequence’ can be confusing as well I guess, since this re-numbers patterns into a consecutive order…but doesn’t actually ‘sort’ the existing patterns. If you have: 1-2-4-3-5,…selecting ‘sort pattern sequence’ will re-number that sequence to 1-2-3-4-5. What you’ve tracked in pattern 4 is now renamed pattern 3. When I think of sorting, I don’t expect this behavior. Not a big deal or something, but a lill strange maybe

While it is of course possible to work with the current arranger, it could be sooo much better in terms of overview and functionality. Again I’ll refer to Fl Studio’s method of arranging; there the patterns & playlist (where you arrange the patterns) are separate and I think if Renoise incorporated the same method it would win epically. You could just sketch a few different ideas and lay them on the side, and drag 'em in an arrangement if needed.
Right now your ideas/patterns are always part of the same linear chain. Even though re-ordering is a simple mouse-drag away…when you come back to an old renoise project…visually you can’t really see the arrangement or get a grasp of what you were aiming for without listening (some might say this is a +). So, yeah you can add a name to a pattern and give a description, but still you’re looking at a ‘monophonic’ representation of a polyphonic composition

I’ve been doing it the oldschool tracker way since protracker, but can’t wait to see the next evolutionary step.

[Conner_Bw]

First time I tried Renoise, I was like WTF, the right ctrl key doesn’t start the song? THIS ISN’T FT2?!

Then I learned to use the space bar.

Years later, all the computers in my house are OS X and said key is called the “apple” key.

[PiT]

Hi! I use renoise from last year and simply I LOVE IT! renoise is the best for drum programming/crazy-FX maker with the 09xx, 0Exx, B0-B1 commands (that I always use)… I make some of my best loops in congiuntion with the loop points in the sample view… I thing that if a position of the markers S/E and the type of loop(forward, reverse, pingpong) are writable in the effect column section, for example:

C-100 … fsxx fexx --> xx(00-FF) forward, start, xx - forward, end, xx
— … … ---- ----
— … … ---- ----
C-100 … rs60 re80 reverse, start, 60 - reverse, end, 80
— … … ---- ----
— … … ---- ----
C-100 … ps10 peB0 pingpong, start, 10 - pingpong, end, B0
— … … ---- ----
— … … ---- ----

renoise kick aSS!!!
I like this in next relase of renoise

[It-Alien]

@Conner_Bw

First time I tried Renoise, I was like WTF, the right ctrl key doesn’t start the song? THIS ISN’T FT2?!

Then I learned to use the space bar.

this is one of the legacy things I never managed to get rid of.
indeed, there is an option in:
edit => preferences => misc => sapce record/stop mode
which, if set to “FT2”, behaves exactly as FT2.

about the arranger again:
I reckon that the current way of arrange is not the most full-featured in the world, and its few features could be done/named better; what I wanted to say, in the end, is that an arranger is not a real solution, if the problem is that people make music by simply merging sketches and ideas together.

anyway, looks like lots of people do it this way, and this is a newbie thread, so let’s take in count their opinion; I will simply go on with “this is already implemented” replies where needed

[pilot7]

edit

[lowkey]

If I could assign a pattern to a key like the sampler does with samples I could jam with them to compose. I could learn what it looks like visually so that long term users dont get features they dont like and nubis like me can get arranging faster.

[s-n-s]

@Tehnik

i don’t understand moaning about arranger - it’s simple and good! devs - please don’t convert Renoise into another crappy FL Studio…

seriously have you looked at fl lately,its certainly dont deserve the "toy-image"it has suffered under the last couple of years.

and i dont even use it.

[Jonas (Djeroek)]

yeah Tehnik, don’t be ignorant. Fl Studio has vastly improved since the early fruityloops days. Don’t be afraid for change. I don’t expect this tracker to ever transform in some magic music makers loops tool for kids. And if you insist on l33t übertracking stick to your copy of noisetrekker.

[toot_33]

Well…
I’ve been using Renoise for about 2 days now
I first downloaded it last year but opened it up once and decided I couldn’t be bothered to learn about tracking.

A couple of days ago I decided to open it up and have another go, this time armed with the tutorials.

30 minutes of reading and the basics made complete sense.

My two little gripes so far are that you cannot input chords in step-mode with one push of multiple keys (this would be great!) and automating VSTs seems to involve a little set-up time so I haven’t checked into it yet (and I’m having too much fun with effect commands).

I really like the way patterns and sequences are arranged, although the function labelling could be improved.
Programming percussive parts is a dream come true…layering samples would be nice though.

All in all I’m really enjoying Renoise, I’ve been a Logic user for 5 years and used other sequencers before that.
Renoise isn’t a complete replacement but it’s so intuitive (once you see past the dazzling columns of numbers), amazing for beat programming and fun to use.

A tracking geek has been born!

[gentleclockdivider]

to enter chords …hold down shift and press the appropriate keys

[s-n-s]

for me the most difficult thing,to get used to in renoise,was the "timeline"but i think thats mainly because i now spend much more time playing around with the different sounds more

[ilkke]

I’ve been using trackers since 1992. All this was of course on Amiga, so I used mostly ProTracker and later DigiBooster (essentialy a ft2 for Amiga). When I switched to PC around 2000. I tried using fasttracker2 but it was already a derelict piece of software, so I was stuck with running protracker in WinUAE untill Renoise came along.
I’ve only been fiddling with it for a while, so I’m avoiding automation and controlling VST and most of the stuff that is not familiar to me. What I immediately grasped were the instruments editor and sends. I still have no idea why the ‘S’ track exists, or what half of meta devices or tabs do. Once I’ll just click on every button to see what happens

GRIPES:

Considering my background, the hardest bit was getting used to sequencer commands that have changed from ST/NT/PT/FT standards. It would be neat if there was a quick reference somewhere within Renoise. Say, a popup under Help menu, preferebly with a key shortcut as well.
Meanwhile maybe we should make a series of reference-card like images that can be set as wallpapers?

Second gripe I have is the awful tiny window for samples of an instrument. It is as if looking through a tiny hole into a vast space, and I really see no justification for this, even though FT made this a ‘standard’. I understand there are GUI space issues, but it can be solved as a popup/foldout thingie. IMO.

Third gripe is the on-screen keyboard. First, and not really important, it just floats there in emptiness and that neither looks good nor feels good considering how the rest of the interface is packed with info and features. Second thing about it is that you can’t really always tell when a black key is playing, and that’s really not that hard to solve. I don’t use a MIDI keyboard, and I like the visual feedback that trackers give you (like seeing all tracks side-by-side, or seeing where on a keyboard is a note that is playing) and this in my opinion adds a lot to the sensation that you are in control of all the data that constitutes you music.
Maybe just make black keys more obvious when pressed. Maybe make the keyboard a bit scalable (or at least have a larger and smaller version depending on resolution).
While we are at it, I really liked (and used) the fake-analyzer that protracker had. It just displayed the notes being played, not their actual frequencies, but this was very useful to see on the fly cause you then saw where there are gaps to put more notes or instrument. This to me is as important as being able to see all the tracks playing side by side and SEE the gaps in rhythm. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’d like to see more visual feedback from the song as it plays.

WHAT I’D LIKE TO SEE:

Apart from the obvious stuff like VST and effects and whatnot, I think the biggest heritage of Renoise is that you can rearrange tracks or patterns or instruments by dragging and you can rename them and such. This is very useful for organizing your song. I’d like to see more stuff like this in the future. Perhaps selecting then shift-dragging in arranger, or being able to group tracks or color-code tracks or instruments or patterns.
The mixer made track effects overview and navigation much easier, but this is still the biggest workflow killer for me. I don’t really have an idea how to improve this, except maybe folding/unfolding dsp’s. While we’re at it, I’m not a piano roll whore, but I sure as hell a ‘machine/routing view’ whore (like in Buzz/Psycle/Aodix/AeroStudio). It’s the only reason that I waste some of my time in Psycle instead of concentrating on renoise but I understand that because of the way the sound is organized it is impossible to implement such a visual organizer in renoise. Oh well. It would be just too perfect, I guess

Now I’m going to the other room to drop dead from all this typing.

[toot_33]

@gentleclockdivider:

Nice one!!!