I’m new to renoise, but seem to be getting the hang of it pretty quickly. I’ve composed a few synthwave tracks on the Pico-8 tracker and I’m looking to make things that are more complex, specifically 80s corporate music that you’d find on old training videos by the likes of John Manchester. I’m obsessed with this kind of soulless music, I love to hate it, and I want to live long enough to see myself become the villain.
I have a feeling that music like this can be made with just the built-ins, because synthesizers were so much simpler then. Anyone got any tips on sensibilities, recommended instruments, recommended process for learning this style, or anything like that? Thanks!
You seem to have a solid sensibility.
Vaporwave origins, elevator music, muzak, department store music, and the pursuit of deeper “ambient” “background music” and pop art turned into music.
The “impersonal sound” that we once pursued by listening to Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk is now often felt against supermarket and weather music.
A unique soulless high quality will be required.
The fastest way to do this is to buy used hardware MIDI instruments such as the Roland SC-88pro and plug-ins, but it is also a good idea to look for sound fonts and the like if you have a hard time.
Sampling Casiotone or similar might be a good idea, but it will sound somewhat punk-ish and will not produce this unique, high-quality, soulless feel.
I don’t even know where I’d plug old used MIDI instruments into my computer. I’m talking just stock renoise so I can get used to the program while I try to make music like John Manchester and Tim Carleton.
Should I start by trying to recreate one of the songs? That’s how I made the theme song for Pony 9000, I just listened to synthwave I like and copied it until I’d noodled around enough to have an original song.
But there’s so many more instruments in Renoise, and these songs have some kind of quality to them I’m not quite sure how to capture. Is it just reverb? Can’t just be massive amounts of reverb is it? There’s something else in it, something simultaneously devoid of meaning but captivating, hypnotic…
You’re right about Kraftwerk, though, I remember listening to their Autobahn tape back in the olden times, and playing one of their vinyls on the air when I read public service announcements.
The textures are from a very narrow period of technological trends in the late 80s and early 90s. There may be a few attempts to reproduce them, but they are no match for the real thing.
Fortunately those used ones should be available on the market at very low prices: the SC-88Pro is expensive, but the unpopular ones from that same era, where the brand was not established, are cheaper.
Basically, all you have to do is connect the hardware to your computer’s USBMIDI cable and input the hardware’s audio outputs to your computer’s audio interface.
You’ll probably have to do some work to bleach the soul out of Renoise’s included samples and instruments to achieve what you want, but even if you did that painstakingly, it would be pretty hard to get this texture.
Fair, I just don’t think I’m ready to learn how to compose from external devices yet. I don’t even have a USBMIDI cable yet. I’m just a neurospicy middle aged woman with very little funds and spare time, have mercy on me
For me, right now, it would do just as nice to figure out how to compose in that style and get something close, even if the individual sounds themselves weren’t period-accurate, and then once I really know my way around the program and the genre I’ll more than likely look to get actual hardware.
Also, I see that these songs by John Manchester that you referred to are partially played live. There seem to be parts where he uses live instruments on guitar and percussion, and there are parts where he seems to be “blowing” synthesizers on the EWI. The expression is quite human and rich. Excellent. It would take a lot of playing and composing skills to make this yourself. Rather, having an AI create it for you might be the shortest way to go.
I’m trying to move away from AI, and I definitely wouldn’t put AI-created music on my next vaporwave album.
And yeah, the John Manchester songs are so rich and flavorful, but they’re like that Wonka candy where you suck on it and it tastes like a whole meal with different courses but it’s just a small candy, it has the trappings of something rich and flavorful but in reality no substance, nothing to say, a feeling of a feeling.
Frankly speaking, it would be quite difficult to create something similar to this in Renoise. Still, it would be enjoyable if you could go through it step by step, little by little.
However, if you set your ideal to this “John Manchester”, you are likely to fail.
Deteriorated copying becomes originality, so it seems like a shortcut in that direction would be to extract your own flavor, or the central part you want to hear and savor, and then expand on that.
It’s like a song made by someone who wanted to hear drum breaks all the time and later called it hip-hop.
If you really want to make it in Renoise, you might want to lower the tempo and rework a slow hand-played version.
If you want the finer nuances of this performance, you will need a MIDI keyboard.
If you don’t have the skill or interest for that, you need to think of another way.
Because what you want to do is not necessarily what you can do.
Oh, from listening to that self-written piece you introduced, it sounds like you have quite the composing skills. That’s great.
That method seems to be one of your success stories and shortcuts.
You don’t have to think that far ahead, since your compositions seem to be solid.
Like you said, just doing what you can and being creative might be enough, like putting reverb on the piano.
Aw thank you! What I lack in jargon and equipment I tend to make up for in 2am stubbornness and a couple of youtube tutorials. It’s just that… there aren’t any tutorials or genre-specific suggestions online for that kind of music (at least that I could find) so it’s a slower start for me on this. A lot of trial and error so far, I have some absolutely terrible pieces of trash I’ve made in my attempts on this kind of music…
For example, a basic Vaporwave technique is to "slow down the sample playback to an extremely slow speed. This direction is more like a DJ or hip-hop composer’s sense of song selection than a technique, but it does not require much skill.
Instead of such sense-driven editing, you want to use your compositional skills to create a solid song on your own?
Of course, sense-driven creation is generally very difficult, and it would take something miraculous to make something good, like the masterpieces of Warhol or Marcel Duchamp.
You should most definitely look into using soundfonts,get yourself a soundfont player and download as many old crappy soundfont files as you can,that would be a good start.
is that like, a plugin for renoise? I’m still very new to DAWs, I produced my first vaporwave album almost entirely in Audacity because I can’t understand FL Studio and its ilk, and most tutorials out there seem to be assuming I have a baseline understanding of things that I don’t.
RENOISE, HOWEVER, has the best tutorials around and I understand this program a lot better, coming from an 8-bit tracker as the first thing I ever composed on.
So yeah, I don’t understand VST plugins yet but I guess I should look into it, seems like that might be what I have to do to get my sound, and I am interested in soundfonts. I’ll try it when I get home
Well you really need to get a good understanding of vst plugins because otherwise you are doing yourself a disservice.You could absolutely make this kind of music without them but do yourself a favor and learn about them and how to use them.
My advice anyway is to get some soundfonts going, good luck!
@NightLeek Did you create that game? I think it has a very nice world, including a shooting game by pink ponies with rainbow trout as the boss.
I personally do not recommend vst, etc., because I feel that they require a lot of clicking and dragging, which can be tiring.
Surely if you are going to make it using only Renoise, using SoundFont would be the fastest way to go.
Renoise can read sfz files.
You can download the sfz file from somewhere and load it as a instrument.
oh sweet! I didn’t know it could natively read soundfonts, that’s a game changer! Thank you! I’ve diddled with soundfonts from SNES games before. Can I download soundfonts from old MIDI hardware?
Also yes! I made that game back in January and when picotron 0.1h comes out I’ll start work on the Special Edition, complete with extra difficulty levels, high scores, and a delightfully terrible Software Automatic Mouth. The music that plays during the levels is an arrangement I made of Macintosh Plus’s “Lisa Frank 420” but the intro music and boss level music are originals.
