Referencing a much older post, I was wondering if anyone has figured out how to emulate dj style scratching in Renoise? I have been bored recently so I’ve taken a liking to mashing up different songs in Renoise and have been itching to make some scratches and I can’t afford turntables and a mixer. I figure this acheivable with with the Sxx and Bxx commands but I can’t quite get it to work it out.
Someone uploaded this in some post or other, looks pretty easy but I’ve yet to implement the technique it very well in my own tunes.
This is a great idea, especially for use with timecode vinyl!
I remember trying this in old fasttracker days, with mixed results. Problem is, for scratches to sound any scratchlike and not just like clean pingpong sample action, there’ll have to be speed irregularities and inertia to target speed, let alone the effects possible by gradually acellerating or decellerating the vinyl. Also you’ll have to simulate that fader the scratchboy will use to mute out certain noises or let the sound stutter and such. Much of this can be done with a tracker and with portamento, sample offset, backwards and volume pattern effects, but it is really, really tedious to program all the pattern effects even for a short scratching phrase and make it sound natural. But possible to emulate - yes. You’ll have to bend your brain like mad to get a feel for how portamentos and such affect speed to work out for this style, and it probably won’t have the same taint like real vinyl soundwise. But you can also program “impossible” scratches, or such your skills would lack for doing on real vinyl.
Don’t know about digital scratching with special controllers, but this would need a special sampler engine with capabilities to automate/interpolate sample playback based on the motion of the wheel.
If you check out the ‘easter egg drumkit’ from the downloads menu i found that the ‘glitch’ macro can sound pretty much as a scratching sound when you play with it. It’s only made by heavy vol/pan/pitch modulation and it should be possible to make it a bit more convincing. You don’t really need the pan effect i believe, so you’re down to volume and pitch.
My suggestion would be to make custom LFO’s connected to a pitch (high pitch range) and volume macro, make the curves so that volume shrinks when pitch is all the way down, simulating a stop.
Edit: I just made a quick example of what i was thinking:http://forum.renoise.com/index.php/files/file/254-vinyl-scratching/
Edit again: made it a bit more complex with some distortion and a dj filter, hopefully sounding a bit more authentic. You can always turn off the phrase if you don’t want to have it in beat.
And of course, for backwards action you have to add it manually with the 0B00 and 0B01 commands.
Edit yet again: Well i got a bit carried away with a new demo song and mixed the scratching with a lot of wacky stuff, added to the download.
you can run Deckadance in Renoise as a vsti and using Grossbeat, if your controller doesn’t match your DJ skills 