Workflow: Managing Multiple Tunes/Pieces

If I were to embark on an album consisting of multiple pieces/songs/acts that are ‘seperate’ tunes but flow into one another… does Renoise support workflow for this?

Is the only way of achieving this to write the entire album in Renoise as one ‘song’ or is there a way of being able to focus on particular sub-songs in the sequence/pattern editor without seeing hundreds of sequences that belong to other tunes?

Its a tricky one this - for this kind of work, you want to be able to work on songs in isolation but then when you work on transitions, you want to be able to see the 2 adjoining songs.

If I were to embark on an album consisting of multiple pieces/songs/acts that are ‘seperate’ tunes but flow into one another… does Renoise support workflow for this?

Unfortunately, Renoise is not intended for this…

I’ve also been frustrated by wanting to build an album of several songs and check that they are not at the same level of mastering.

Here it’s a bit smart and pre-warned when starting the new song, if all the songs on the album use similar instruments. For example, create a song, song 1. After finishing it, you can use a copy of it, erase all the patterns and start the song again, but you will have the base of the first song. Or save this song as a template (that is, you will have already prepared tracks). Thus the mastering of all the tracks of the album will be similar. But all this must be prepared from the beginning.

A practical example could be the albums of Enigma of Michael Cretu, which are overlapping pieces.In this case, it would be necessary to remaster all the pieces separately, and then overlap with another audio program, such as Adobe Audition, for example.

Unfortunately, Renoise is not intended for this…

I’ve also been frustrated by wanting to build an album of several songs and check that they are not at the same level of mastering.

Here it’s a bit smart and pre-warned when starting the new song, if all the songs on the album use similar instruments. For example, create a song, song 1. After finishing it, you can use a copy of it, erase all the patterns and start the song again, but you will have the base of the first song. Or save this song as a template (that is, you will have already prepared tracks). Thus the mastering of all the tracks of the album will be similar. But all this must be prepared from the beginning.

Yeah that works OK if you have seperate tunes using the same instruments as you say but when you have a tune that finishes the same way that another one starts (one tune “leads into another”) then there’s a problem. I totally get it though. Realise Renoise was never designed with this in mind but I thought it would be worth mentioning as a possible future enhancement… However… if there’s only 1 person out of thousands wanting to use Renoise to do this sort of thing, it wouldn’t be worth the developers’ effort.

Yeah that works OK if you have seperate tunes using the same instruments as you say but when you have a tune that finishes the same way that another one starts (one tune “leads into another”) then there’s a problem. I totally get it though. Realise Renoise was never designed with this in mind but I thought it would be worth mentioning as a possible future enhancement… However… if there’s only 1 person out of thousands wanting to use Renoise to do this sort of thing, it wouldn’t be worth the developers’ effort.

I think that if you are skillful with the compass (Renoise BPM and LPB values), you can easily overlap 2 separate pieces. But, as I said before, it is best to use an external program that allows you to overlap extensive audio tracks.

That’s how I worked with Impulse Tracker years ago, and I’m still amazed at the results I got.

I think that if you are skillful with the compass (Renoise BPM and LPB values), you can easily overlap 2 separate pieces. But, as I said before, it is best to use an external program that allows you to overlap extensive audio tracks.

That’s how I worked with Impulse Tracker years ago, and I’m still amazed at the results I got.

Enigma is a great example. I guess I could still work on individual pieces with Renoise and then export MIDI to another app. I’m just no fan of the piano roll in Cubase/Sonar. I grew up with Mod tracking with OctaMED on the Amiga so no surprise there. :slight_smile:

Another way would be to just save one song’s ending to a new file and start the new track from there.

Enigma is a great example. I guess I could still work on individual pieces with Renoise and then export MIDI to another app. I’m just no fan of the piano roll in Cubase/Sonar. I grew up with Mod tracking with OctaMED on the Amiga so no surprise there. :slight_smile:

Another way would be to just save one song’s ending to a new file and start the new track from there.

Well, if you are very organized with the tracks, and many of them are repeated among all the songs on the album, it is not unreasonable to use only one song for the whole album.

If you do a quick calculation, with BPM = 155 and LPB = 4,with 64 lines per pattern you obtain more than 4 minutes with 40 patterns, 40 minutes with 400 patterns, 80 minutes with 800 patterns.Renoise supports up to 1000 patterns.You can use sections in the matrix editor to separate each song.

If you start a new album project for several songs, this could be a pretty professional solution.The difficulty lies in being very orderly with the patterns, the tracks and all the instruments.If you use VSTi instruments, the song will really occupy very little space, they will only be text data (XML file). If you use samples, it changes a lot, since the samples will be saved on the song-album…

I think this is a very cool idea. As you point out in your first post, you have to do it in a single Renoise XRNS. You could use multiple projects by rendering stuff out, so for example you render the end of song A and include that sample in the song B project. But there’s nothing like sub-projects in Renoise.

I think there are a couple things that make the organization pretty helpful. The first is track groups. You can create a group for all tracks in a song. Then you can collapse the entire group to a single thin column.

For instrument organization, I like to use an empty instrument as a separator. That way you can easily keep track of which instrument is used for which song.

Pattern separators to indicate song begin / end and internal sections. There’s a keyboard shortcut for navigating between separators, it makes it fast to navigate. If you wanted to get fancy you could use naming conventions and build a tool for faster navigation.

The biggest potential challenges I see are project file size due to using lots of samples (can be slow to save), and send tracks. If you use a lot of sense it can get messy.

Overall I think it’s a cool idea and one I might try :slight_smile:

Pattern separators to indicate song begin / end and internal sections. There’s a keyboard shortcut for navigating between separators, it makes it fast to navigate. If you wanted to get fancy you could use naming conventions and build a tool for faster navigation.

I tend to use the Section header/splitters in the sequence editor quite a bit. For me, the easiest change would be to introduce coloured section splitters - and allow multiple section splitters to be contained together (or allow them to be made taller). I find it so hard to remember which sequences are which so I have to make lots of annotations.

You mentioned “group tracks”. I’d love to have “group patterns” - being able to minimise a sequence of patterns (like a typical “treeview”). Really I should be mentioning this kind of thing in the ideas/suggestions section though. This would certainly be an easier change to make and it would still use one song for the entire album.

I tend to use the Section header/splitters in the sequence editor quite a bit. For me, the easiest change would be to introduce coloured section splitters - and allow multiple section splitters to be contained together (or allow them to be made taller). I find it so hard to remember which sequences are which so I have to make lots of annotations.

Yeah I hear you, it would be cool. In the mean time, maybe something like:

== SONG A START

– section 1

– section 2

== SONG B START

etc… for now our only option is text, so some sort of indicator that distinguishes song start points from internal sections would be helpful. At least, that’s the approach I will try.

You mentioned “group tracks”. I’d love to have “group patterns” - being able to minimise a sequence of patterns (like a typical “treeview”). Really I should be mentioning this kind of thing in the ideas/suggestions section though. This would certainly be an easier change to make and it would still use one song for the entire album.

Yeah! That would be awesome. That and grouping send tracks and I think Renoise would be super clean for long projects. Or maybe hiding / focusing on tracks and patterns.