I’m getting back into Renoise because I’m starting to produce things more reliant on samples, and the sample-first approach of Renoise is more than a bit interesting. That being said, when it comes to sampling from individual songs (especially from full song files rather than, say, snippet recordings from vinyl), I’ve found basically every DAW to be more than a bit annoying. I’m also fairly dim, so I haven’t really pieced together a decent workflow yet for this sort of thing in any DAW, including Renoise.
You basically record the parts you like to an instrument via the record feature and inspect the waveform in the waveform editor and process it for increase in optimum volume via normalise and edit out parts not required via trim and delete and slice a rhythmic phrase via slices or markers or the various tools in the forum. You can also timestretch the sample to fit a particular tempo. Thereafter you map it to the keyboard (slicing already does that for you) and reevaluate if the mapping scheme works for you. Further you can layer more samples by zone and velocity. You can create phrases out of them via the phrase editor and trigger them from one note in the phrase editor.
Loop slicing and sampling is way too easy in Renoise becos it’s so powerful, if you do it old school on an MPC be prepared to forego every convenience from the laptop big screen to the easy slice and dice done visually to large RAM recording time to easy do it later features, which can all be done on an MPC too just more bare metal style. Keeps your fingers and ears very very sharp though, just like how the pioneers did it. Currently Akai has some great gear like MPC X which is more of an entire computer and MPC hybrid with a touchscreen and all the software features of today’s machines.
Trackers also have a remarkably similar workflow from their limited 4 track trackers to ancient soundcards that had to be hacked and jacked to utilise their full potential and the way samples were effected and used the various algos done in a vertical scrolling screen and low res samples and simple waveforms… if you do things this way, now doubt you will find Renoise way too easy again…unless you go for the scripting duties which engage a different part of your brain and also is what makes Renoise unique.
After your editing duties are over from the waveform editor and associated features, you start with your composition and production. How you proceed from here is anybody’s guess. In a tracker environment choices are huge, you can do note entry step editing, live midi recording, sample triggering from the samples you recorded, load plugins and use them too, do sound design with the built in FX and modulation and so on. Since you are new to both Renoise and the sampling workflow,my suggestion would be to read up on MPC gear from Akai and how the hip hop community makes tracks with that and a turntable, read up on the history of some of the pioneers and their interviews on how they use their gear and their productions styles; read up online on tracker music and the Demoscene, watch videos on YouTube about all this, read the scene magazines that used come out in the late 90s and electronic zines that used to feature tracker techiques and so on. Renoise is the longest standing and the best of the bunch, the most powerful and well featured and well designed. It has a long future for anyone looking to do tracking on a modern computer. The community and forum is very knowledgeable and information rich and very alive so you can learn a LOT just by lurking in these pages
I load or record some tune into sample editor. Then I chop out some samples and start mangling them in pattern matrix.
But more often I sample from existing song in realtime. I route audio input (be it vinyl, cd or music from e.g. youtube) into the line-in device in chosen channel. Song is playing and sametime I can record snippets in sample editor. But this is more like live performance.
