I’m curious if anyone here is using Renoise to make ballads or orchestral music? I’d love to hear your tips and experiences!
Use velocities for a more expressive performance, custom volume modulation envelopes especially for attack (I sometimes even modulate the attack curves and start times), multi-sample instruments with round-robins really make a big difference, smooth tempo changes (especially at the end of a piece).
Below you can find some examples of tracks with orchestral and real acoustic instruments. All made with Renoise.
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One workflow that fits Renoise well for these styles is to treat the pattern editor as part of the performance, not just a place to enter notes. Keep each section on its own track, then shape the arrangement with send levels for shared reverb/delay rather than putting a long tail on every instrument. That leaves room for the melody and makes transitions easier to rebalance.
For ballads, I’d sketch the harmony with a simple sustained patch first, then split it into accompaniment and answering phrases. For orchestral parts, small differences in note starts and releases between sections help more than adding layers everywhere. Pattern aliases are useful when a verse and chorus share the same accompaniment but need different endings; duplicate only the few patterns that actually change. Once the structure is settled, rendering or freezing dense sections keeps navigation responsive while you continue arranging.
Since You can make those kinds of musics in pretty much any tracker we really should concentrate on methods universal…
First of all is knowing how to make that kind of music, knowing your chords & what works with them & what don’t… It pays to just JAM with that kind of music to program your mind as to what is happening…
Get way away from the single-finger ‘fat sound’ which won’t work here, you will find layering thin sounds to become fat works well & one must be wary of too much taking up same frequency space… Forget triads you’ll need to use/learn compound chords mostly…
Also making sounds loud then soft in intelligent ways is worth working towards… If you listen to these types of musics carefully you will hear this…
If your tune is a bit long look to have somewhere there is a total break of silence for a bar or two to bring the audience back… I even do that in short tunes…
So getting familiar with compound chords is a good place to start, I hardly ever at all use triads anymore, they just sound too bland & ‘country’
All these have no triads-
In AXS-
in Protrekkr 2.8-
WIP in SVArTracker-
Another thing is that the space between notes is just as important as the notes themselves & Nothing wrong with more silence injected properly… Of course I violate that rule sometimes…
Looking at my ‘closed’ soundcloud account now 3.5 years since I closed it but it’s still up & running I forgot my first AXS tracker tune-
Also here’s a WIP in Protrekkr 2.6 I did that uses both of the built-in 303s, one for dedicated bassline the other for counter riff filling-
I guess the old ‘closed’ account will live on forever… Hey, wait a minute here’s one I did in an old version of renoise-
And here’s one done in Aero Studio that seems to have garnered some likes even though it is not at all a good tune-
So what’s the upshot?.. Not any of these have a single triad in them, All compound chords in all tunes here but none really professional at all… ‘tracker garage’ material, experimental, challenge of a constricted environment, etc…