I have decided to finally try one of these piano rolls I have seen before. There’s a few of them so I was wondering which one you are using, for those who are using one, that is.
I do not need the one with the most features. All I really want is reliable, stable, not many glitches or strange behaviors. Just something that works how you would expect it to, and is easy to learn. Something that integrates well with the main software.
I only know of 2 piano roll tools. There’s simple piano roll and the other that I know is piano roll studio. Are there any other tools I don’t know about?
Anyway, I just use simple piano roll because it’s free and piano roll studio is paid. I’m a pretty basic user because all I need for it to do is writing chords more easily. once I’ve got just a couple hotkeys figured out I’ve been happily navigating it pretty smoothly. I know there’s all these other cool features too like looping and histogram stuff but I’ve never touched it. This tool is the only piano roll I’ve ever used btw because I’ve never used other modern daws before so it’s not like I’m speaking from any authority
Thanks for replying. I believe there was one or two other piano rolls for Renoise but they are names I came across over the years so I have forgotten them. Or perhaps you’re right and there’s only two.
I just installed SPR for the same reasons you mentioned. It seems good enough for my needs and the other one has tons more features so maybe I’ll upgrade if I need to later on, but this one functions pretty well for now.
Any hotkeys I should be aware of to make using it easier? Only problem I’m having so far is that on long patterns pressing Ctrl and using the mouse wheel to scroll left to right is a bit slow and tedious. And I don’t know if there is any way to zoom out the horizontal scale to show more of the pattern at once. Other than that, though, it’s really not too bad!
f1, f2, and f3 are really useful for switching between selecting, writing and previewing. Those are the only hotkeys I’ve been using. I also setup 1 as the key for opening and closing spr. For me I don’t usually make my patterns longer than 128 lines anyway so I haven’t had to deal with long patterns. When I got the tool, by default it actually made the grid super duper long. Now I have the grid size set to 64 by 32 in settings. It sounds like you might have the opposite problem though. You can go to settings on spr by hitting the hamburger button on the bottom right and set the grid size to your liking there
Thanks for the help with keyboard shortcuts. I appreciate it 
In the settings I can also change the number of lines it skips with the scroll wheel so that makes moving back and forth inside large patterns much easier. This is a great free tool. Almost feels native like an official part of Renoise.
The piano rolls in the plugin version are usually quite ugly, except for one whose name I don’t remember, if I find it I’ll post it here! It’s a fairly advanced piano roll, if you want you can change the length of the notes with each pattern to humanize the instruments during the song, it has many functions but you can simply ignore them if you don’t care and otherwise it’s a very normal piano roll… Alternatively there are two piano rolls for Renoise… or you need to integrate some other DAW into Renoise (in my opinion you can find the most beautiful piano rolls, in order: on FL Studio, Studio Uno, Ableton Live, Reaper). But if, as you say, you don’t have to do anything special with it, the simple piano roll in Renoise is fine, it’s what I use too when I don’t need strange things.
Piano roll? What’s that? You mean like on one of those paper scrolls on player pianos?