I’m currently exploring renoise as a replacement for:
rosegarden (no WAV-export)
qtractor (no SF-bank-addressing, not honouring legato-pedal of my keyboard)
lmms (midi-latency too long, no means to turn of metronome)
Now I came up with renoise - as I spent already hours in exploring I definitely would spend the Euros in renoise if it solves my problems/needs (nevertheless this is no negative judgement on the packages mentioned above! they all have their strenghts and - if fitting the individual needs - are really great!)
My workflow usually is:
Target: let my virtual jazz band play and record a song
equipment; MIDI-keyboard (yamaha clavinova) attached to midi-in
opensuse linux, P4/2,7 GHz, 2GB RAM
use percussion from predefined patterns
record individually the bass line (here I use 4/8-bars patterns which I copy/paste)
record melody and backing instruments usually as full length track
maybe add audio track (acoustic guitar)
do midi mix down
export wave
master wave and convert to mp3
And my first question is: (thanks for everyone who has read until here
how do I record an entire track on an infinite time line (my first tries have limited recording always to one pattern and recording has looped over this pattern overlaying the recordings)?
Second Question:
I’m using soundfonts and would like to ask the following questions:
first I load the soundfonts to my creative/soundblaster into different 4 banks (0,1,2,3) using sfxload. this works fine (has been proved in rosegarden)
then instrument configuration in renoise allows selection of instrument by number. This works only for the first bank. If I choose a different bank, I always get only the instruments of the first bank (qtractor shows the same behaviour) - is this a known problem or am I misdoing something?
third Question:
my Rhodes-Soundfonts sounds more interesting if I would apply a “velocity bias”, thus using the more overtone-rich samples without need to hit the keyboard too hard. Is there a “midi-velocitiy-bias” in renoise (this is no “must”, just a very nice feature).
There is a little button just below the pattern editor in the “Pattern Editor Control Panel”. Look left of the “Q” icon quantize button and keyboard icon chord mode button. Also look in the Renoise manual under Pattern Editor/Pattern Editor Control Panel. This toggles looping the current pattern and continuing to the next pattern. New patterns are not created automatically while recording (by any method i am aware of, anyway) so you may have to figure out how many patterns you will need before recording and add them first. Maybe you already do this.
For soundfonts, why not use a vst sf player instead of loading into your sound card? Cakewalk offers SFZ+ for free and it is a pretty nice freebie. SFZ+ also offers a variety of velocity curves and these could be the answer to your third question.
edit: SFZ+ may be windows only, I’m not sure. Didn’t think about that…
On the left side, you mark a loop (or two) in the Sequence Editor. Then, with the auto-clone tool active, new patterns will automatically be appended while you record. I don’t know about “infinite” but this allows a recording to keep going until Renoise runs into the maximum pattern limit.
Q.3 not as yet as far as I know but MIDI velocity curves has been suggested in the past and sure it’s something that could be done via scripting if somebody had the wherewithal.
Others have answered Q1 but if you use the record button in the Sample Editor does it still only record a Pattern’s length? Not done any recording myself but though via there was free-running.
Thanks all for these very fast and constructive answers!
@Q1(track recording) I’ll try both suggestions and thanks for the hint to create the patterns right before or to use the auto-clone Skript (due to limited lifetime of myself I will not really do “unlimited” recordings :-).
@Q2(MIDI banks): on linux there exist “fluidsynth” as soundfont plugin which can be my workaround (similar to the suggest SFZ+). I am just bothering about CPU so leaving sound generation to the sound card is same as leaving rendering to graphics card. But we will see and I will also investigate on these “Instrument Aliases”.
@Q3(MIDI velocity bias): no “showstopper” for me in using renoise - and maybe kind of exotic question (I found this funtionality on cakewalk musiccreator on windows and it’s for certain samples/soundfonts quite useful).
thanks again (such a good forum support is also strongly in favour of renoise).
Does your midi controller have no velocity curve settings? Mine does and that is what i use. Not being a piano player, I tend to like my keys to react a bit towards the loud side.
No, I am not using a midi controller. My MIDI-keyboard is a digital piano (Yamaha Clavinova) which since about 20 yrs greatly bears my heavy treatment (from beethoven’s sonatas to my jazz/blues fantasies).
Using soundfonts this is exactly what I would like to have (reacting of keys towards the loud side to get easier into the overtones when playing). I also do not have pitch bending and so on - but I got a great and reliable piano-like keyboard
Well, midi controller includes midi keyboards in my thinking. But i didn’t realize the clavinova series has been running for that long. Wow. My favorite keys to play on are alpha juno-2 keys. Maybe strange, but oh well. Despite that I have not regretted at all the small investment I made on an oxygen49. Feels kinda cheap, and it is, but so functional and handy.
