I’m glad this topic has come up again. I love Renoise, and I love hardware synths, but I haven’t quite found my way with marrying the two together yet. I can’t shake the feeling that they could be a perfect combination, if I could perfect the recipe.
I find that sampling short phrases doesn’t always make the most of the variations you naturally come up with by tweaking hardware. I’m more likely to repeat the same samples again, rather than say recording a longer audio take while twiddling some knobs.
Perhaps I need to get used to the idea of using longer samples.
I haven’t really tried making sampler instruments out of hardware derived patches yet. I get put off by the things like the speed of a LFO modulation or length of an envelope changing with pitch. Sometimes that could be cool perhaps, but not always what I want. Do people sometimes sample every note? Must take a while, and that puts me off as well.
But I think the power of the sampler is one of the best things about Renoise, so probably ought to give this way of working a try.
Perhaps for me, a traditional DAW might just be best for working with sequenced phrases played on hardware synths, and Renoise maybe better for building sampled instruments from single notes. I quite like sequencing MIDI in Renoise though.
I’m sure there’s a way for me to find satisfaction with hardware and Renoise though, if I could just find it. I think I’m probably limited by my mindset.