Trick Needed

So, me and my friend are working on some remixes, and on our stuff. We’re working in ableton live. Sometimes I miss a few things that are easy to do in renoise and difficult in ableton, sometimes I don’t. We tried to make some things in renoise, but it always comes to difficuties in programming notes in really high resolution like 1/32, mainly the problem is with note off’s. Also lack of possibility to see the waveform in pattern editor is kinda difficult for us to make variations with the recorded loops from external synths, which is a little easier in modern daw’s.

I’m not bitchin about renoise or something, I know it’s value in making breakbeats, sample experiments, and overall sound etc, but I’ve never tried to use renoise for some heavy bad ass sounding synth riffs with not very complicated in composition, when layering is crucial and so on…

Does anybody has any ideas how to break through those difficuties(no waveform in pattern editor and so on…)? Maybe it needs to imagined: The guy’s used to standard DAW shit, and wants to sqeeze out the best of renoise, and hop on to renoise from live.

So, any tips?

Thanks

You can adjust resolution by changing the LPB (Lines Per Beat) setting in the Transport Panel.

At the default setting of 4 LPB (4 pattern lines per beat) each pattern line presents a 16th note. If you move up to 8 LPB then each line represents a 32nd note. Move up to 16 LPB and each line is a 64th note. Etc.

Exactly how high do you need to go?

(Note: these are not criticisms of Renoise, just observations on trackers in general!)

The trouble with increasing the LPB to get more granularity is that you can end up with unmanageably long patterns (or an awful lot of patterns – the only Renoise-specific point I’ll make is that the way pattern-sequencing is done is not as slick as it could be; OctaMED still wins in this area); although at 4LPB each line is a 16th note you can’t make them staccato and can run in to problems if you’re using portamento as there’s no room for a note-off between them – it’s akin to the Nyquist limit; you really need twice as many lines per beat as you have notes. Also switching to and from triplets is also a pain, as is doing anything polyrhythmic. There are somethings that a tracker-style system just isn’t suited for, just as there are things that tracking makes easier – realistically it makes sense to keep both in your workflow and use whichever one is best suited to your current task.

Thanks for an answer but I know that, it’s just when I increase LPB to a satisfying 16, full quarternote is quite big, and It’s difficult to track what’s happening, say 2 bars further. So, you either see details, instead of the big view, or big view without possibility to program notes in high resolution. The same refers to chained patterns instead of standard DAW arranger view, when you can pretty much see every event on each track.

So it rather is the matter of little possibility of zooming in & out fast, that we have difficulties to overcome, and also lack of visual waveform.

Renoise rocks, and I know that renoise is quite unique, and that’s what makes it so different is it’s power. But I’m trying to make renoise’s versatility as close as possible to the versatility of standard DAW’s.

Thanks again Dblue anc Elbiggus

If you need notes that are shorter than a line don’t forget about the Note Cut command. This works in either the Pan or the Vol column.

“Fx - Cut the note after x ticks (0 - F).”

Admittedly it doesn’t give you true freedom on note lengths, limiting you to 1/12th divisions as standard, up to a maximum of 1/16th if you use tick=16 for your song. May help with your staccato when you have notes on adjacent lines although you do need either Pan or Vol to be free.