What made Renoise 'click' for you?

General Discussion
41

hmm, late to this thread, like most other things, haven’t been around here a lot for a while.

my renoise story is i was an old school folky muso since long back in the day, and a lover of almost any style of good music, and had been working in computers for a long time, and was looking to combine my love of music with my computer knowledge to maybe make some sounds for fun one day… well, this was quite a few years ago now.

so i started the long learning process that never ends… and really early on stumbled across renoise because it ran on linux which was my preferred platform. i hadn’t used any daw before,

i went on the renoise irc channel and talked with a few of the guys who used to hang there at the time. my questions were basically along the lines of “so renoise has a tracker heritage, if i learn this as my first daw will it break my brain or something so i won’t be able to learn the more common tools??” heh heh, well after being asked what kind of music i would like to eventually be able to make (which was experimental electronic at the time) the guys in renoise irc encouraged me to just jump into renoise first (no suprise! ha ha) :slight_smile: and so i did.

well these many years later i’ve played around with every kind of daw and all the other kinds of related digital musical software, and i can only say that still every time i come back to renoise it seems like a comfortable place that i’m not figthing against to try to enjoy playing with music.

… eh, so, to cut an already way too long story shorter :ph34r: i never did the historical trackers at all, and i think back then i learnt a lot more in a much quicker way by starting with a sensible organised piece of software like renoise where all the underlying digital music technical issues were so close at hand, so close to the surface.

anyway let me end by adding my thanks to taktik and you others for this good and fun place to explore sounds. :drummer: :guitar: :walkman:

42

In the past i used to play with Impulse Tracker, love it so much and the super fast way of work.

​Nowadays, it looks like that Renoise have no direct competitors. It is modern and pretty much convenient.

​But sometimes i feel weird and begin to think that Impulse Tracker was superior in terms of ergonomics and overall speed of work… Maybe it is just nostalgic feelings…

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43

Simply enough : I find trackers to be a fantastic way to force you to use your ears. It’s not visually appealing, whereas on traditional DAWs I often find myself drawing things I know works rather than listening.

It’s also great to punch values on the keyboard to get a random playground to work with. I made my best music with Buzz bach in the days.

Renoise has all this, but in a beautiful modern package. I love the animations, the colors.

I also love the way everything has its place : your have your structure in one place, the notes in another one and your sounds in yet another. It makes the transition from demo to final song seamless : small rearranging, clean rerecord of your sounds, mix and voila. You don’t have to start over.

Also, after 10years of ever painful attempts at making music on linux using only FLOSS, when I tried Renoise, it looked like the most professional and solid DAW ever made by mankind (Yeah, music on linux is THAT bad… I know some people like this OS but —you know— there are also people who love to get their nuts whipped… you can’t always trust opinions).

Here you go.

44

You know, I’m not actually sure.

Generally, but perhaps mistakenly, I consider myself more of visual person, so I should in theory be more at home with the vertical DAWs and music making tools, especially the ones that are canvas-style like FLS, Bitwig and Live. But for some reason the only things that I made on a modern computer and that vaguely resemble tracks, or something that may become tracks, I created in Renoise, and it feels the most familiar to me. It did so right from the start, but I don’t know why. I think it may be because it’s so immediate, a more direct interface between the user and the machine. It’s no-fuss, no multiple windows, all very compact and distraction-free. Renoise is closer to hardware than other DAWs, even the ones that claim to replicate hardware.

None of the other DAWs that I have tried feel so much like an actual instrument. None of them does, really. They don’t trigger creativity in me. I like that the information is all there, right in the center. No need to click through boxes to locate relevant data. The lack of a graphical piano role makes some aspects harder, but in turn the textual interface also makes me think and focus more, which is probably why I get results. I don’t just fiddle endlessly with little rectangles and then have a clip and nothing else. In Renoise, I start with just a pattern too, but it’s more than just a clip. It’s like an organism that evolves. A seed, not just a leaf.

Maybe background does matter a little. My first machine was an Amstrad CPC 6128, back in 1984, running CP/M as an OS. It had no GUI, just a shell. Software was hard to come by, so I learned how to program, and I had fun writing little sound tools that I would then embed programs that faked the shell and that I put on the demo machines in an electronics market, waiting for customers to press any key that would trigger a sound cacophony. It was glorious, like in those hidden camera shows, and I wasn’t even expelled from the store! Later, when I had an Atari ST, I explored trackers, but I don’t remember sticking with them. By that time my interest in coding and music had diminished and I was into the fascinating online world (BBS or mailboxes, as we called them). I did listen to a ton of MODs and was fascinated by demos, but didn’t have the focus and discipline to learn how to make my own. It was only in 2012 when I decided to get into making electronic music, and well, it’s been slow-going. But the most (any) success I’ve had with Renoise, and while I don’t regret buying the five other DAWs I have or had licenses for, I think Renoise really is the only music making software I need.

45

Love that line ‘a seed, not a leaf’. Going down someone else’s memory lane kinda feels emotional sometimes… I was getting lost in the woods out here :slight_smile: Lots of great accounts to read in this thread.

46

Really inspiring to read such great stories almost six months on - for me the main thing that inspires Renoise for me still is the keyboard work flow, reliance on my own ears and the Architect theme - a sheer wonder on my aging eyes after the vomit of Ableton…

Freaking joy to work on! Bring on teh Funk

47

I made a decision to use Renoise a few years ago and I noticed I created more songs with that program because it’s inspiring. I then got into Logic ProX because I’m a new mac user in 2016. I produced using Logic ProX from 2016 - 2018 and while I love mixing in it, I don’t like producing in Logic .

So? I’m back to RENOISE 3.1. All I have to do now is produce then render to audio(for each file), open in Logic then mix… Very shagadelic.

I just love the fact that I can make Rave Techno music easily with Renoise… I think my brain works better if I’m composing vertically…

48

Renoise actually took a long time to click. Not how to make music on it, that was simple based on having used trackers and other DAWs before. No, I found myself having to do things for a long time making mistakes, going back and undoing them, then doing them correctly the Renoise way. I found the tracker interface took longer to learn than say, Modplug Tracker. So is it unintuitive? I say no, it just has its own internal logic and feel compared to other trackers that is worth taking the time and effort to get used to.

49

I used Voicetracker and alike on the C64, Protracker on the Amiga 600 and Fasttracker on the IBM Compatible back in the days.
From 1998 - 2013 i used Buzz -
but eventually switched to Renoise since it’s more stable, has a great UI and a sampler which is just fun working with.
Even though Buzz has the most inspiring sequencer i ever found in a tracker, Renoise can be more inspiring in general.