Whilst looking for new musical gear to buy recently, I came across the Polyend Tracker and the Dirtywave M8, another, yeah, tracker. All of a sudden, I found myself travelling back to the late 80s and was back in my old bedroom. There in front of me was my beloved Commodore Amiga and running on it was the coolest piece of software of the day, Octamed written by the legendary Teijo Kinnunen. I loved the thing, I was knocking out tunes like nobody's business in my late teens. Along the wall I had a series of shelves that gradually filled up with a sampler, mixing desk, MINIdiscs, my Yamaha CS2X, probably another 8 years after that moment in time by which time I had built my own PC running Cubase. Plus I was learning to play guitar at the time and continuing to teach myself as much as I could about keyboards and music theory... I am no session musician and always prefer to pretty much program my synths nowadays on the Mac with just a bit of live improv on my Keystep Pro as the new control keyboard I purchased just two weeks ago.
So it was a nice trip down memory lane, to re-aquaint myself with the concept of trackers. I didn't have the budget for a Polyend because to me, Renoise is a better option, especially as it allows me to use my VSTs. Now VSTs are as much an investment in a home studio as is anything else, so it's great I can use them in any of the DAWs I currently own. I use different DAWs for different things after all.
So Renoise, what have I learnt so far?
A lot, to be honest I might even prefer working this way.
Vertical workflow rather than the usual horizontal
We are so used to scrolling down these days, so working vertically has become something we're more accustomed to. Trackers work a little bit like a spreadsheet, with each row representing an event in the musical sequence, so in other words you can place a note on each if you wanted to but in most cases you might want to place a note on every 4 rows, making 16 rows a bar at that particular resolution. Each column represents a track. However you can have sub sections within each column where you can apply effects for each event. So each note could have it's own effect. That is where it gets very powerful because you might want to open up a filter on a set of hi-hats gradually from the start of the bar to the end, perhaps to announce a change coming in, the pace of the song is about to pick up or the main melody is about to drop.
Shortcut commands
I've not got into these much just yet but there are various commands you can add to a track that can control the flow of your song. Let's say you want to switch an effect on or off with a certain beat, you can do that. You can issue a command to stop the playback at a point and many others.
Sorry no demos today
I would normally drop in a Soundcloud link here but I've not yet purchased the full version and when I do, I'll be able to export wav files and so on, so forth. I've got something cooking up though and I will show off a few sample slicing tricks when I can.
Renoise on Hive
A few people have written about the product in the past here on Hive but not recently, so happy to tag #renoise for any of you out there who might be looking for this content.
Daily diary of stuff for PUM
I am attempting the impossible by writing a short 100% HP post each day about stuff I am learning about, including Renoise and my usual VCV/Bitwig content. I may write about front-end dev too or whatever else I get up to. Let's see if I can do it. TBH work gets quiet at this time of the year.