Okay so I just bought Renoise yesterday and couldn’t have been more happy with my choice of software to start my music production career off! However, after watching all the tutorials and reading them as well, I still find myself having trouble! I’m really into dubstep and wanting to really make dubstep beats, however, like I said, I’m having trouble. I was just wondering if anyone had any idea on how to make dubstep beats. I know there’s tutorials on youtube, but they’re pretty hard to follow and understand. Does anyone know of any step by step guides to making dubstep in Renoise? Also, are there any books or anything on Renoise because reading the manuel online just bores me to death ahaha! Also, how long do you think it’ll take me to learn Renoise and actually start producing music? I love the format and the tools and everything, but it would be so much better if I learned everything that comes with it! I’m there’s so much stuff to learn to make a great production!
Anyways, all input, and help would be greatly appreciated!
i bet despite all your reading efforts, what you forget to do was search the forum… but i might be wrong. anyway, if you do a forum search for ‘dubstep’, you’ll find all kinds of threads with people asking for fat dubstep bass and how to make dubstep and whatnot. you could read through those first.
second, Renoise comes with demo songs. one if them is ‘Jong Belegen’, which is a dubstep-tune. load that up and check it out, figure out how it was done.
third, use an LFO-device on a filter-cutoff, and modulate that, and you are in wobbly-land.
on how long it takes to learn all functions of Renoise, that depends how much time you spend with it, and how much you read about it in the tutorials and the forums, and of course how easy you pick up information and so on and so on. so, what i’m trying to say is: nobody knows.
Find XRNS files.
or
go into the songs directory and make sense of what’s happening in them, some are fuckin nuts crazy smart!
Best way to learn stuff like this is going through other people’s stuff.
It teaches you reverse engineering which in hand teaches you how to figure out what other people are doing, then you adapt it to what you do = Win!
renoise changes the state of your computer into an instrument, a computer instrument.
So it’s the same as learning to use an instrument.
When music making with renoise,
the only difference between any kind of music is samples,
note placement and command effects usage, after that it’s all theory.
First of all. Welcome as new Renoiseuser.
First, I would try to simply make some tunes in Renoise, that come out of your mind, simply to learn how to use Renoise in general.
Then, like rhowaldt said, check the tutorials and search the forum.
I always tried to go into a special musical direction and ended up with something kinda different that made me happy to.
Don’t try to go into a special clichee, simply start makin music.
(i’m getting in the habit of making this suggestion to people asking for tips to learn Renoise)
as everyone knows, all learning comes from experience. the problem is you sometimes feel like you are just dicking around, especially when you are just starting out. to learn well, you need to have a target. so, my suggestion is to try and join a round in the Dead Dog Disko Renoise Competition. You can find the forum-thread for the current round here: https://forum.renoise.com/t/dead-dog-renoise-competition-12/32046.
the idea is usually very simple: you get a sample pack, some ground rules, and a deadline. just make a track.
now, don’t feel intimidated or anything. the word ‘competition’ throws people off. remember, you need to have a target, so a competition is targeted to have a winner, simply so people have the feeling they are doing it for a reason. but there are no prizes in the DDRC, so the winner just gets the honour and mention and that’s it, off to the next round. in the end, it’s all about having fun, and take my word for it that you learn a lot from doing this.
(you can check out the previous competitions’ forum threads in the competition forums, and the DDRC Soundcloud page for examples)
Thanks for all the input thus far guys! I really, really appreciate it ! I think I’m going to read the manuel just so I can learn about everything and what it does cause like I’ve said, I no nothing at all in the music productions. Like when watching video’s and reading, I always see stuff I don’t know like parametres, LFOs and all that kind of stuff so I think it’s best for me to read the manuel, then to watch the tutorials, then go through samples, then enter a competition! It’s not going to be easy at all, but I’m dedicated and ready to take this challenge on! Hopefully it won’t take too long as I want to start making songs, but you gotta do what you gotta do right?
i had that same problem starting out, and we probably all did. i watched all the video’s and read all of the text regardless of that, reading stuff i only half understood, but just keep on reading it, once you read about something long enough you either start to understand it, or you use wikipedia or some shit to find out exactly what it is. good luck!
I learned tracking through scouring old amiga pubs and watching the songs as they went by,
pairing what was happening on screen to what I was hearing.
I was able to make sense of it very quickly this way. (and asking a lot of questions.)
In retrospect doing so strengthened my left hemisphere for analytical thinking.
So the only main difference between now and then is renoise has the dsp chains and devices. (a huge amount of people that will gladly answer questions too)
Those devices have their own specific commands numbered by where they are located in the chain. I suggest just using the manual only as reference, and instead watching what is happening in a song. or possibly even going through those videos again and mimicking what is happening on screen.
Right now someone could probably write a cookbook of the vast amount of things that can be achieved with renoise.
and don’t forget, Zen and the art of tracking, it’s a great read, but at the moment I can’t locate it.
I’ll post a link back once I do unless someone else knows where a copy went.
I want to back up rhowaldt’s point of view, emphasizing on kazakore’s DDRC. It’s a great way to learn! As a noob, the DDRC made me try hard. Harder than I ever tried before. Harder than I would have tried on my own. The first few rounds I didn’t even dare to participate, because all the other entries sounded that pro, and I just had a go without sending an entry. You know, just do what you like with the given material, and compare to what the real contestants did. This will get you some confidence, and there you go BAM!, sending your first entry to kazakore!
From that point you will have great fun with the compos, but that’s not the end of story. DDRC is a wonderful place to learn, yes. But from what you learned you will go on with your own thoughts. Most of my DDRC entries grow, I use VSTIs in places where the DDRC rules didn’t allow it. And this is where for the first time I was able to create a SONG instead of just some random loops.
101010 - Thank you so much for that, and I’ll try and track down a copy too, I’m usually good at that stuff. I only really want to read the manuel because I have literally NO clue what anything means. Like when people say “DSP” or “modulator” or any of the tracking language, I have no clue what they’re talking about. So if I were to go and mimic or try to see what an artist was doing in the song, I would have NO clue on what they’re doing due to my inexperience. Like say they put a filter, and then I put a filter, I would have NO (again) clue on what the filter was doing I would only be using it just because they told me to use it! So if I read the manuel, I feel as if I would gain some knowledge then try and see what’s happening in songs and tutorials, but as of now, again, I know nothing .
f+d+k - I’m going to do that, just after I get some more knowledge !
Thanks so much for all the replies and help guys! Keep posting, I’m loving it, and really learning lots!
My advice would be to make tunes yourself. Just attach things to other things, move DSP sliders and see what happens.
Have you got a decent sense of rhythm? Try jamming out a dubstep beat in time to the metronome, then quantise it or tidy it up. Learn how to use filters.
DSP: Digital Signal Processing. so, it processes a digital signal (hey! :). a digital signal would be, in most cases, an audio signal. you would say you ‘applied effects’, and those effects would be DSP effects, because they do something to the digital (audio) signal. (there are different signals like cv etc, but let’s not get into that right now) modulator: something that modulates something. simple as that. it really does not mean a lot on itself, the question is what kind of modulator it is. it’s kind of another way to say ‘DSP’, in most cases. filter: filters and audio-signal. as you might know, and audio-signal is a wave. the easiest example would be a sine wave (check out the samples that came with your Renoise). now, that wave has a frequency (amount of vibrations over time) and a resonance (height of the peaks). because it is a wave, with each up/down movement it passes through several frequencies. if you want to, for example, make a bass, you don’t want it to go through the higher frequencies, because you just need the low ones. so, you add a low-pass filter, which only allows the low frequencies to pass through. LFO: a Low Frequency Oscillator. an oscillator is a device that creates a wave. the LFO creates a wave that is used to modulate a certain characteristic of another sound. so, for dubstep, when you let an LFO modulate the filter cutoff (the cutoff is the point where the filter closes), changing it over time, you will hear that wobbly-effect come out because all that is (essentially) is which each wobble periodically allowing a bit more high frequencies through the filter.
now, this is all a bit much in writing, and some of it might need slight correction from other forum-members who know more about this stuff than i do (i’m self-taught in this), so it is best to read about the filter, than add a filter in Renoise and check out what it does, than read again and see if you get it. the same goes for the LFO.
@101010: I just looked at this “Tracker’s handbook” and IMHO it’s really more confusing than informative (esp. to a newbie). I guess it’s good as a history lesson, learning about the mid-90’s when dozens of trackers were competing, bringing things into perspective and all…but if you just want to learn Renoise it’s not that useful I think
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! I think I’m going to read the manuel just so I can learn about everything and what it does cause like I’ve said, I no nothing at all in the music productions. Like when watching video’s and reading, I always see stuff I don’t know like parametres, LFOs and all that kind of stuff so I think it’s best for me to read the manuel, then to watch the tutorials, then go through samples, then enter a competition! It’s not going to be easy at all, but I’m dedicated and ready to take this challenge on! Hopefully it won’t take too long as I want to start making songs, but you gotta do what you gotta do right?
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