I just wanted to share my recent revelation as to why Renoise is proving to be my perfect DAW and music making partner…
Once you get your head around the hex and vertical scroll, it’s VERY intuitive.
The layout - having everything easily available on one screen. Sample view is a god-send. I think Ableton may have taken a leaf out of Renoise’s book here.
Integration of FX and VST’s - coming from a FL Studio background, having to scan and select which vst/fx you want to display. It becomes a mess and ball-ache at times. Renoise nicely puts everything in its place. Neat, clean menus.
Immediate sampler integration - cut yourself a nicely sliced sample? BAM - generate drumkit. Having also used Reaper it’s not meant strictly for production, more live recording and mixing but fiddling with Shortcircuit for a few hours to get each slice up and running. Plus, having the sample view and fx to hand is REALLY useful when it comes to manual slicing, the longer I have spend analysing samples the easier it becomes to slice by eye.
Scaling - It runs just fine on my E6600 Core2 as my Samsung NC10. A truly portable studio. Yes, I have to watch the plugins on the latter, but rendering and beat-making on the go. Just freaking awesome.
Fun - messing with sample commands. Learning, mashing up. Playing with loops live, jamming. All of it.
I do occasionally use Styrus and 3xosc from FL in my Renoise tunes, but these are then rendered to wav and dropped back into Renoise for mixing. I just can’t fault it - for every little ‘issue’ I find with Renoise there is a logical and sometimes innovative solution. No DAW will do everything you wish for quite yet - but for your £££ Renoise really cannot be beaten.
A BIG thanks to the Dev Team for all their work, I really wish publications such as Computer Music dedicated more column space to trackers and Renoise. It might start off quirky, but once you dive in and start making beats it’s really special.
I’ve developed this habit which works really well for me recently. I’ll do the initial writing phase and mixdown in renoise. Then I’ll stem it out and do a second phase of additional mixing and extra bits in live.
that way because everythings stemmed there’s minimal CPU and also I get the advantages of both. I get the awesome speed, editing and accuracy of renoise and then in the final phase I get the waveforms and a whole new set of CPU cycles to play with.
what does your process look like? cause I too record vocals in other programs. however it kind of gets on my nerves when I’ve bounced the instrumental, loaded it into logic then start noticing the mix doesnt work with the vocals and then I have to go back to renoise, re-mix, re-render, re-load into logic OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
I’ve been playing with the idea of recording vocals in logic, live or whatever then putting those takes into renoise and mix more there, but I still havent gotten a solid “formula” of how to do it…
what are your methods? could rewire be of any assistance?
I really like how Renoise is very accurate. I just started using it this month, but before that I used to compose music on notation based programs, Finale/Sibelius.
You can also be very accurate with those programs, but in order to do that, everything has to fit perfectly. That takes time, but with Renoise I get my ideas written down faster.
I Rewire to Reaper or Ableton. At least it takes a lot of the hassle out of rendering all the time. Just finish the song with the Rewire and then dump, or record directly into the Rewired DAW.
Welcome to Renoise! I hope it continues to be an excellent journey for you. A question: I see you were using what is regarded as a standard tool for classical music composition. By any chance is this the sort of music you write? Modern? If so I’m keen to survey your work with Renoise
Personally I use several programs, mostly because I think it is fun, and different programs can sometimes offer a different perspective to what you want to achieve with music. However, I always seem to end up in Renoise to get the main bulk of a tune done. It is just so fast to do very accurate programming; and the GUI is very well done. If / when Renoise comes up with a clever way to deal with audio (as in audio tracks) - I dont see myself using any other program anymore
Cool. I’ve never really got into ableton and i know i should, but in every audio oriented program since impulse that i have actually used i’ve always been like “why can’t i just edit my sample how i wanna without doing some stupid loading, dumping, finding, reloading, or whatever some kinda lame retard stuff first or whenever”. i even said it in a cali accent even though i’m from tx. god of software samplers, renoise is. never turn your asr on again.
I used those programs because that is all I knew from private music theory/piano lessons about music. By ‘sort of music’ I suppose you mean ‘classic’. Not really, I mainly wrote short piano motifs and transcriptions of my favorite songs.
I think that with Renoise there’s more freedom to experiment and build your song, but with F/S it is mainly used when you already have the composition.
I could use some help, where can I get some more tutorial files like those that came with Renoise. Perhaps also some basic songs that I can analyze/study?
There still isn’t a community repository of XRNS files unfortunately. It would be a big job to make it happen.
Ask plenty of questions in the beginners and help forums. Listen to the new releases on the songs forum. Join in on the rolling conversation at the IRC channel #renoise.
Persistant work at experimenting with the tools at hand reaps improving results.
