Using Renoise To Perform Live?

Help, Support & Bugs Beginners Questions - Renoise
1

I’m not new to Renoise (or tracking) but recently I’ve been thinking about playing some of my newer material live. A quick bit of history, I used to do this in local pubs & clubs in the early/mid 90s with an Amiga, Octamed, two synths, and a guitarist. The Amiga would sequence samples and midi data, I would play some parts on the keyboards and would mute/unmute tracks as appropriate and a friend would play guitar.

I currently do everything in Renoise, and don’t have any external gear apart from a Launchpad, the Korg Nano series, and an Akai MPK Mini.

So, as someone who is completely green when it comes to realtime use of Renoise - can anyone let me know what addons there are that allow you to perform live? A quick beginner’s guide or summary of each one that explains roughly how they work would be an absolute godsend :)

Thanks!

2

Fingers!! The most useful of extremities

Nah, seriously it really depend on the setup, the style of music, how “live” you want it to be. I have been at perfectly acceptable concerts that didn’t have any interaction between the musician and his tool of choice at all (well, except perhaps “I just pressed the play button”), instead focusing on the connection to the audience. I’d say: hell yeah, as long as the music is in fact good.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, you would get something like a band playing improvised music. Here, each member needs to be able to respond to each other, something that would require a lot of practice and some pretty responsive hard/software.
And then there’s everything in between…?

If you can wait, I’m actually going to post a roundup of the tools that are currently available, focusing especially on sequencers and similar “performance-oriented” stuff. I’m going to take some time explaining the differences between each, and hopefully it can act as a sort of guide to the wonderful world of those crazy, inspired scrips that people have come up with

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That sounds great! Definitely In Depth/Blog worthy :D

4

I think somewhere between your examples, but closer to the ‘press play’ example ;) Something that lights up the launch pad, allows muting/unmuting of tracks, sample triggering in sync with the song, and playing one-shots would be perfect… but I am entirely flexible depending on what solutions there are :)

This sounds perfect, I can’t wait to read it!

5

This sounds interesting! - could be nice to be able to :)

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Watch Hitori Tori videos, it’s all done with midi triggering and multiple Renoise instances. YMMV

7

Well, currently I’m creating a live act based on renoise/reason. I use renoise as an sequencer/sampler/rewire-host and reason for sound design. I also got apc40 and I use it via duplex. So far I’ve came up with something like this below, and I say it works quite well:

-I assigned apc’s control knobs and sliders to many different things in different songs(renoise projects), yet they have some things in common. In one song for example, a slider controls the volume of drums group along with fx, and in other one drums with hihats. Or in one of them one knob controls hpf cutoff of 3 synths, and in other one the same knob distortion gain on 2 synths. You just have to assign it to something that does something spectacular with a chosen type of instrument.

-I keep all the patterns in 16 step (4 beats), because there’s an 8 step sequencer made from stop clips buttons on apc40 if it operates via duplex, and it’s super-cool for some stutters and beat juggling, ableton can’t do that even if apc is designed for it.

-The controller’s matrix is for the mute tracks.

-Master effects, and some global commands like play, stop and so on are under the same knobs/sliders/buttons in every song.

Fortunately I play along with my friend who writes music and plays from ableton live, and we just sync two laptops via midi, one song from one computer blending with a song from the second and so on, just mixing it dj-style in other words. I couldn’t find a way to hook up one song to another so I could play two or more songs in a row from few instances of renoise.

There’s a lot of fun playing like this, people ask me what’s the software I’m using and if I’m looking into matrix source code right now if everything flows vertically :)

Any thoughts on it? Or maybe somebody knows how to split a big pattern into smaller 16 step patterns without tediously copying everything? It’s a little difficult if whole the song must be built up from the beggining in almost only 16s patterns.

And yeah, duplex is bugged like hell and you should figure out what not to do during live act or it will crash.

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Problem is, only a few people are actually submitting bug reports.
Hmm…Let’s not change the subject, but I think it’s important to emphasize that any and all bug reports are more than welcome - as an example, see the last few posts in the Duplex beta thread (a bug which had troubled DoubleDeep was fixed in a matter of hours)

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Okay so expect me to submit some, I’d like to help making duplex better

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Thanks very much for the blog post covering these tools - it looks like ‘Cells!’ or ‘Grid Pie’ are the most likely candidates for my needs. I’ve got a lot of experimenting to be doing now :)