For years, I’ve dismissed trackers as “geeky”, “limited”, good for only “ChipTunes” or repetitive dance tracks, and generally “not for real musicians.” (As if I am one. hah!).
Well, I was 100%, pure D wrong. Renoise is really, really cool. And really surprising to me is that the types of music being produced with it range from…well ChipTunes and Dance to classical, ambient, and experimental.
Calling Renoise a “Tracker” is like calling LOGIC a “Sequencer”: True but hardly sufficient. Renoise is a full featured DAW. It handles plug-ins (AU/VST), audio recording, ReWire, ASIO multi I/O cards support, and full on PDC. It offers a bunch of internal audio and midi effects, an integrated sampler and sample editor, internal real-time effects with an unlimited number of effects per track, master and send tracks, etc.
The Renoise Main Interface
Don't let this prejudice you...
The interface can be very confusing at first. For historical reasons as well as convention, the interface is “turned on its side” as compared to other sequencers / DAWs. (A composition’s time flow is “up->down” as opposed to the usual “left-> right”. And the thing is optimized for text keyboard input of notes really although other methods are well supported.) It takes a minute to get used to aspects of its sequencing, entering controller data, etc., but this is literally minutes if you avail yourself of the quickstarts, tutorials, and videos created by its rather passionate user community.
Renoise also has some neat unique features like an “Instrument Grabber” that lets you create sample-based instruments from any AU/VST plugin (freeing you from plugin dependencies when you want to travel with the tune), and something new to Renoise 2.5 called a ‘Pattern Matrix’ (that I do not fully understand as yet). From their site:
In Renoise you build your song from the bottom up. The workflow is based on patterns, lines, and the details in between. Something that gives an overview from the top down, a birds eye of view of the song, has always been missing so far.
The new Pattern Matrix ingeniously solves this problem the Renoise way: without radically changing the nature of Renoise, the tracker.
Patterns and Tracks are divided into Blocks that can be moved around, providing the ability to manage the flow of the music instantly and easily. It’s a natural evolution to the product, and quite frankly is just damn cool.
Renoise 2.5 Pattern Matrix
It’s just friggin’ neat. You should definitely check it out at the Renoise site. Take a half hour and go through the “starter’s corner” material (strongly recommended if, like me, you are not familiar with trackers). You can also find lots of stuff (some helpful, some not so much) on YouTube if you do a search on “Renoise Tutorials“.
Oh, it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux and it’s only $75 for a full license. (The unlicensed version is fully capable I believe.)
In any case, I’m going through tutorials and exploring this tool. I’ll post observations and some sounds in the near future.
UPDATE: I searched at SoundOnSound to find articles/reviews on Renoise and found nothing. I left a quick note on the forums asking a) opinions about Renoise, and b) when we could expect to see an article or review on the DAW in the magazine. Hope to get some response from Paul White or Hugh Robjohns or someone over there.
