I read a lot of webs about music production. They mention bitwig od reaper etc with every new small update but ive didnt see any proper announcement of R3 yet or review! You know what i mean, attractive video full of wobbles, trap whistles and flashing images is needed.
Because.
What Renoise needs in terms of advertisment is good musicians and composers who use Renoise to make good music, get popular, and people will be begging to know what software they use to make their sounds. People like Venetian Snares using Renoise brought a lot of people who have never heard of trackers to the software itself, but there aren’t very many popular people out there doing stuff with it. It’s the reason why when Skrillex said he used Massive to do stuff, people ate that software up.
If you really want to advertise for Renoise, get good and get popular and it should take care of itself. No video or demonstration can compensate for the lack of quality music coming out of the DAW.
Naah, bitwig wasnt out yet and everybody was talking about it.
Even older version of Renoise had better support from webs like kvraudio or musicradar.
It’s simple really, give renoise to anyone who has never used a tracker and doesn’t wish to,
They wont tell you a word about the compressor or convolver not sounding like other convolvers, not even the sample recording issues, they will tell you that navigation, note overview and note input is a pain.
Drums - fantastic, everything else involving notes and people begin to complain, go ahead and try it.
- Listen to the demo-tracks and you’ll know why Renoise isn’t popular
- Watch the demo-tracks playing and you’ll know why Renoise isn’t popular
- Understand what’s going on under the Renoise hood and you’ll know why Renoise isn’t popular
When people learn that I make electronic music, they might ask “so what software do you use”. Easy answer, “I use Renoise”
But when someone asks “hey, I want to make electronic music myself, what software should I use” it’s more complex…I might recommend Renoise to about 1 of 8 people who ask this, based on quick impression and a few probing questions from my side. The remaining 7 people I recommend something else, like Ableton/Bitwig or Max/Pure Data.
What I’m trying to say here is that word-of-mouth has always been the best way to advertise anything. Trackers are not for everyone.
PS: I believe that Bitwig Studio was in part hyped because a lot of people liked that someone stepped up to challenge Ableton (including me).
At the risk of sounding vacuously profound… Renoise occupies a strange, uncomfortable space.
On the one side you have the trackers. Imagine a small tent city of many electronic musicians and few rules, rowdy and raucous, with plenty of sound and beat but little in the way of traditional music theory. The trackers were initially a labor of love of those electro-migrants, and the best way to sell software among them was by word of mouth or presentation of demo.
On the oner side you have traditional DAWs. Imagine an old outpost, of tall buildings and rigid rules, with firmly established ways of doing things because that’s how they’ve always been done. The music software of that community is big-name, often sold by association with the big names that use it. (Yes, I know, sound is important too, but whenever I look on the Propellerhead or Ableton boards, the people considering buying it are clamoring for what famous talents use it, not what it sounds like.)
Renoise added more features of the traditional DAWs than any tracker I’ve ever known (though admittedly I haven’t known many). It left the tent city, which it outgrew, and now resides in a cave in the desert between them. It doesn’t quite fit in either community now. Fortunately it has enough visitors that some day a town might spring up around it too, but I still think it’d be cool if it at least went up to knock on the gates of old DAW-town and made itself known at least.
Bitwig is indeed overhyped. I tried it, but it has nothing fancy which would convert me to a bitwig user. I’m mainly a reason user and i love it, but i found renoise again. I like renoise, because it has a fast workflow with samples(i would say, the fastest compared to other daws) and its 100% keyboard driven. But it has also some weak points, like live recording automations, no realtime timestretching, some missing basic sampler features, some features are not complete(live recording rewire inputs, render rewire or midi(hw) to instrument) and its sometimes confusing when you are a beginner. But i think some of these points will be solved in the future.
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Renoise has always been promoted quite okayish, but I agree version 3 got less attention. This is probably due to the fact that version 3 polarized the Renoise community quite a lot and there are still conceptual things to even out, which will probably happen in the next release. I could imagine, that taktik and crew want to wait a bit longer until things are as awesome as they initially planned.
There are good/famous musicians using Renoise. There is B-complex, who makes amazing music and got quite famous in the DnB community! There is Perquisite, a dutch producer who, together with Pete Philly (a Dutch, yet English singing Vocalist/MC), made an amazing album that was not only famous in the Netherlands, and even featured Talib Kweli!
Well…Better support for drumkits in the sampler
The demo songs to me show that Renoise wants to be in a niche. This niche is intelligent dance music or whatever this thing is called these days. It is all about songs being complicated, new, unexpected and “intelligently” arranged. It is not the thing I personally would listen to in my car, dance to, or just listen to on my headphones while walking outside.
A wider spectrum of genres would certainly be nice. (Get a demo song from B-complex for instance!). Before I got into Renoise, I myself always ignored it in the past, because I have been under the impression that it targets a very specific niche (as I said, IDM, and maybe chiptune stuff). This impression was so strong, that I never demoed it even. At some point I realized that Perquisite was using it and this alone actually made me realize that, despite how it is perceived (and maybe even designed to be), Renoise is more than a very esoteric “techno machine” (excuse this rather negative expression, but I read it somewhere here on the forums lately, and it somehow got stuck). This, and the fact that I remembered they support Linux natively, made me give it a try.
Your last point Bit_Arts…well, yes, I know what you mean in particular (hence the comment earlier on not marketing R3 that much for now).
What I am trying to say is that Renoise does nothing to appeal to a larger audience. If this is intended or not, I don’t know.
So, to wrap up my long response: Show the world that Renoise can do all kinds of electronic genres, including the more popular ones. Dance, DnB, Dubstep, Hip Hop, Bigbeat…you name it.
I picthed some ideas when Loopmasters asked me to write an article for them. One of them was an introduction to Renoise - they were not interested in at idea at all.
My conclusion can only be that the illuminati are against Renoise.
Yes. Exactly.
It’s a brave new era.
You couldn’t give away analogue synths and drum machines in the early 80’s. “Everyone” (rich kids) were into clean digital sounds. Then a lot of innovators (broke kids) bought them cheap and made Hiphop and Techno.
Im more than happy about Renoise 3. I don’t need the opinion of magazines/websites who seem to give high scores to companies who happen to advertize with them.
piano roll
this.
Anything that could be zoomed in and is easily navigatable with more than 1 note playing at the same time could be enough.
Well, it’s not like magazines are giving bad marks to Renoise like you seem to imply. Every time I see Renoise mentioned it’s very favorably, for example
http://www.musicradar.com/us/reviews/tech/renoise-software-renoise-2-0-202120
But they have to cater their coverage/tutorials to the software their readers use so Renoise doesn’t get covered as often as it is more of a niche product - the tracker way of doing things is not as widely spread as the more conventional DAW’s.
I think Redux is a great idea to get the non-tracker people interested in the Renoise mindset, maybe get more people exposed to it.
In my opinion Renoise has quite good concepts and very talented programmers. The concepts maybe are not perfect and could be obviously improved, but hey, look at competitors like Steinberg Cubase or Apple Logic: They stick with the same features in editing for maybe 20 years now. Pianoroll is a pain for fast, precise and detailed editing. Only Cubase has inplace pianorolls, but it’s still not as lucid as a normal tracker view.
I think Renoise devs should concentrate on features that make Renoise more similiar to other DAWs first: Borderless editing, more graphical look of the notes data (maybe remove pattern hacker commands completely by default), standard click operations, fine resolution for midi recording etc. If I talk to normal DAW users (that mostly only know the pianoroll or “stepeditor”) they all tell me that they are frightened of the excel look of Renoise (or any other tracker). Arguru had some cool ideas in Aodix.
After these steps, the devs should promote Renoise heavily. There is no reason to hide.
It’s a vicious circle, I believe: Lack of popularity results in less coverage, less coverage results in lack of popularity.
Some thoughts on that:
Compared to other DAWs, there is very little in the way of video tutorials, both for novice and intermediate users. The official tutorial video is for 2.8, and a couple years old, and that’s only for beginners. How much current educational Renoise video material is out there? How many videos that introduce, in detail, the new stuff in Renoise 3 and show how to use it?
Ease of learning is relevant, and probably one of the bigger issues. The traditional way of learning a tracker was to load up modules/songs and analyze them. That’s the same way people learned how to program in the eighties and nineties, too. But times have changed and many folks want (and expect) to be shown things. That’s where Youtube videos come in.
Every other DAW has a ton of up-to-date videos. If you want to get started with, say, FL Studio, you go to Seamless’ channel and watch the dozens of quality tutorials which cover a large number of topics. And if that’s not enough, you can watch hours worth of “track from scratch” videos. When I wanted to learn Reaper, I went to Groove3, dropped $30 for a tutorial series, and that got me up to speed. For Renoise, there isn’t much material, free or otherwise.
Differently put, if there is a large body of tutorial-style material, people get through the “wtf do I do?” stage quickly and start making music right away. (Very visual DAWs like FL, Live, and Bitwig are also more intuitive to the average person.) Commercial sites and “the press” want to make money: clicks, page views, visitors. They can help making a DAW popular, but they also respond to what’s in demand. So if they advertise something for a bit, but the demand for info doesn’t really pick up, they focus on something else. It’s easier to sell something flashy like Bitwig.
Sharing songs made with Renoise is nice, but let’s face it, you can do most songs with any of the big DAWs. Often, the plugins are the same anyway. So it comes down to other things: ease of learning and available resources, workflow (videos on what makes a tracker workflow great), and community.
I think those of you with advanced Renoise knowledge could probably make a real difference (and perhaps even earn e-fame! 
) if you sat down and started to make how-to videos. But that’s work and there are probably some self-esteem issues to overcome (“My voice sounds like shit!”, “I have a strong accent, no one understands me!”, “I suck at teaching!”, etc.).
Besides all of that, maybe trackers are simply a niché that will never again be as a relevant as they were twenty plus years ago. Bit like text adventures.