This Thread is about trackers
In my experience with trackers and daws there is a feature such as rewire or something similar that allows you to have the capabilities of both…which I sort of played around with using the free trial version of renoise and my daw…as for my attempts at using buzz I simply exported the drum track and used it as a stem…
I know some people here use more than one platform to make music…so feel free to share your experience with trackers…
I don’t have much experience personally but I’ve always wanted to check out Renoise and others. I think there are some cool DS trackers as well, so I have no excuse for not taking the plunge yet.
Renoise is the shit, fucking amazing! Once you learn your keyboard shortcuts it’s lightning fast and it will take you to some odd places.
I only moved to Live as I was mostly using hardware and wanted something with a more linear approach.
All my stuff is made in Renoise, never used any other DAW. It’s cheap as fuck and once you learn how to use it it’s serious fast.
I used to spend hours inputting note and command data when I first started out, I was using samples only. But as I got better with the software using it differently. Now I do loads of complex cross modulation kinda stuff, like what you might see on a modular hardware setup where one thing affects another which then affects another in a sequential chain. Although it’s not got the same capabilities as actual modular, and Reaktor blows it out of the water, but I never could get the time to sit and study Reaktor and I’m too broke to afford hardware modular, so Renoise does me just fine.
It’s pretty impressive how many features it has and how deep you can get with it considering it’s such an inexpensive piece of software that’s made by something like 5 or 6 people.
I’ve been trying to get my hands on Renoise but I have not been able to… Yet
I know it is really good to create drum patterns and that’s what I want to get out of it.
Renoise has a vst and I can work with it in Ableton. Thanks for this tread, it will help me a lot
Great. Please share how you started and I would like to know some tips for using Renoise as a beatmaker. Cheers
I started in 2015 I think it was. I was in college and didn’t really have much cash, just wanted to start making music but didn’t want to invest big money on something like Ableton. Actually I might not have even known what Ableton was. Not sure how I found out about trackers, I think I just came across it when googling cheap DAWs. Then I just stuck with. I fucked around with all sorts of other stuff like PD, Composer Desktop Project, Max/MSP, Reaktor, and tried the demo of Ableton eventually but always went back to Renoise just cause I’d gotten so used to it. Still want to learn Reaktor though.
Anyway’s in the start I made a lot of crap stuff, for like 2-3 years just loads of unfinished, badly mixed songs. I did make a few alright things though. At the start I was listening to a lot of Squarepusher, Aphex Twin especially the Drukqs album), The Tuss, and Venetian Snares so I was after the breakcore/drill n bass sound. I spent a lot of time chopping, layering, and processing breaks, and learning the best ways to re-arrange them, and how to create new rhythms from old breaks. At the start I did it all note by note, then I learned how to do random selection from a pool of samples using the keyboard to layer samples combined with the maYbe command in the phrase editor. Basically what I could do then was create a pattern using a single C4 note on the desired lines in the main pattern editing window, load in a bunch of oneshots, or sliced break hits, hit play and then Renoise would just create an endless randomly generated drum track. Then I’d just program in everything else around the drum track.
Here’s one of first randomised breakcore type tracks I made:
https://soundcloud.com/r_edm-an/n-l
Some breakcore style tracks I did manually editing everything per note:
Then I got bored with breakcore, and chopping breaks and moved onto other styles. Did a lot of messing about sound design type stuff to see what I could make Renoise do.
Like in this video for instance. You can basically create a tone generator in Renoise using a 1 sample sound with DC Offset and the Ring Modulation device combined with the Key Tracker. So I created like 5 or 6 basic of those and used them to make this.
Did a lot of ambient drone stuff using sample manipulation combined with the above tone generators. A lot of timestretching using the beatsync option in the sampler, and the rubberband tool (there’s loads of free tools that you can download on the renoise website and install):
Then after a while started to use it like a modular setup as I described in the above post. Really what I wanted to do was see if I could make a fully fleshed out track using two or three source sounds. And this is the what I came up with:
It’s just two kick drums and a pad sample. All I did was use send track in Renoise’s sample to split the signal of the kick drums to various other sends and added DSP to the send tracks which altered the drums sounds in glitched out ways i.e repeater, chorus, phaser, etc. to build up layers to the overall track.
After that I just kept going in that direction and now I’m still doing this but with way more modulation and I also incorporate some of the old things I used to do around my breakcore phase as well like randomisation.
Which brings me to here:
https://soundcloud.com/r_edm-an/bb89-v10
Everything I ever needed to know about Renoise I found on the Renoise forum. When you’re starting out just hang out there, search the topics, and ask questions. The forum is very active and someone will always try help you out.
The most basic thing you need to learn is probably pattern settings for note lengths, and time signatures. So learn about pattern length, and LPB (Lines Per Beat) first. For instance if you have a pattern with 96 lines, and an LPB setting of 24 then every 24th line is a quarter note (96/24 = 4), every 12th line is an 1/8th note (96/12 = 8), every 6th line = 16th note, etc. This is how I used to use it for breakcore because you can divide down to triplets 24 = 1/4 note : 24/3 = 8 (every 8th line is a triplet). But when I ditched breakcore I switched to using a pattern length of 16 with an LPB of 4 (16/4 = 4, every 4th line is a quarter note) to replicate hardware sequencers. To change time signatures just add more lines to the pattern 20 lines at LPB of 4 = 5/4 (20/4 = 5) and so on.
After that learn you’ll have to learn hexadecimal, it’s not that hard you’ll get it pretty quick. I actually don’t even worry about it anymore cause I only need to remember about the three different hex numbers (FF = the highest, 80 = middle, 00 = the lowest), but it’ll depend on what you need to do.
After that it’s all down to just experimenting and practicing. Download other peoples songs from the forum and study them to see how they do things and you’ll quickly build up methods of working that work for you.
While I learned the secret of music, I used all DAWs and trackers on the market. (Buzz, Buze, Renoise, scale tracker, milky tracker, Sunvox)
From a height of flight I can say use whatever you want.
For example, I cannot make music as a person above. It does not fit in the brain what kind of patterns are there (although he described the process). But probably something will work out for me, because I know it is written on the tracker. I don’t know why I wrote the last paragraph.
I’m back to trackers though i don’t even know one but i like the sound.
Now i’m downloading Milkytracker.
@st3aLth pending upon your OS pro tracker might be more effective you also gotta learn hexadecimal in order to apply effects and the Hot keys for doing things like sequencing and sample editing…pro tip the change tempo command F(something) helps to create swing and odd grooves…
I love trackers!!!
It’s so easy to make something interesting quickly. There’s been so many times that I’ve start the creative process by just randomizing step commands. The learning curve is a bit steep, but once you got it; it’s like having control of the matrix. Everything is customizable. Last week made an entire song using the probability command on every thing. I rendered the song 5 different times and got five completely different takes. I wouldn’t recommend it for “normal” people.
I use Renoise, but I started with Schism… Then BuzzMachines
I say to myself “I should take time to learn Renoise” since I bought it in 2010.
I’d really would like to take that time x) It looks awesome, it’s cheap, it is hella stable, it is not very cpu-hungry, and it’s fun but I’m stucked inside Ableton.
This is my experience in a nutshell. I’ve recently spent a week checking out the commands in renoise and absorbing video / manual content while applying what I’ve learned, but I don’t think anything is going to fully take me away from Live.
Redux on the other hand seems tempting. I wish you could get both for the same price
I started with Renoise, roughly around 2007 or so.
most of the tracks on my soundcloud were done with renoise!
I think i will start watching youtube tutorials about OpenMPT tracker and i will try to apply that knowledge to buzz tracker.
Renoise is still my favorite software even if I’m just sequencing things I did with reaktor. Like everybody else has said, once you get it down, you can move really quickly and make ideas up on the fly and never press play/stop. I hadn’t touched it for a couple of years, I was worried that when I updated to the newest version it would be crowded with useless shit but no, they just seem to make it better and better without bloating it.
There used to be a quick sheet for commands on the website, you can basically leave that window open and experiment for awhile until you memorize it all and then you’re good to go!
I did the same earlier today, I’m thinking of using those stupid noise blasts as a design tool and demoing forever 
I miss using Renoise but every time I do I just go down a micro editing spiral without getting anything done.
But I hope I’ll have spare money once the NerdSeq Portable is out…
I Just discovered >>>
reViSiT - Professional Tracker Software and VST Plugin
I can use it like Redux i.e. loading a tracker in a daw
