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I tried my hand at learning Renoise at the start of quarantine, after years of wanting to add tracker fluency to my skill set. I'm a regular user of Ableton, Lo

I tried my hand at learning Renoise at the start of quarantine, after years of wanting to add tracker fluency to my skill set. I'm a regular user of Ableton, Logic, and Pro Tools and despite having a degree in computer music I've never been able to wrap my head around Renoise. Does anyone have stories of the "aha" moment for them, or recommendations on how best to teach yourself? If I recall, the official tutorials were somewhat lacking. I'd love to see an experienced user describe their workflow and approach. I already know a tremendous amount about DAW's and production technique. I'm looking for someone to give a wide overview and describe what it does well.

mike_h 5y ago
If the trickiness is from the tracker paradigm, the way I got into it was to take existing projects and study them one track (column) at a time. You can find a bunch at https://modarchive.org/ https://modarchive.org/. Not sure if Renoise is compatible with historical tracker files, but there are links at that site to apps that do.
micklemeal 5y ago
mike_h has some good advice, deconstructing other people's songs is a great way to learn Renoise. The forum was pretty friendly when I was active, and people post examples frequently, so that's a great resource. I also recommend learning the keyboard shortcuts like the back of your hand. It really helps with keeping in flow and is one of the biggest advantages of the tracker interface.
- molotovbliss 5y ago
  Old mod creator here. (B00MER/kosmic aka kfmf) Most of the fun that disappeared with mp3s is such an ability to deconstruct another's work because of the similar appreciation for the same art. I would spend hours upon hours pouring over any of my favorite tracker artists like keith303, purple motion, lizard king & c.c.catch, etc. even ended up flunking out of high school because the demo scene art subculture was really alluring to my younger self, as it just made sense to me & was something I thoroughly enjoyed. To this day I can typically listen to any song and see the tracks, channels & notes in some regard. If you have no formal background in music but have an itch you can't scratch, explore trackers or even the more popular DAWs like Ableton. There's not much rules, so just have fun. "Even if I'm the last person out there doing it, it's a quiet pursuit. It's, a personal pursuit & it's something that helps me get up in the morning." -dj shadow
  - mycall 5y ago
    Old creator here too. I miss the Fast Tracker days. I went so far as to have two Pentium II computers both running Fast Tracker, using MIDI clock sync between them then deconstructing source music from all those favorite tracker artists, playing partial multiple songs at once. It never got old, always fresh each time. Then MP3s came out and the whole concept of trading source music for live remixing was lost. Another amazing thing was how compressed they were. I once put my favorite 1700 S3M/XM/IT/etc songs onto a single CDROM! That in itself is wild to think.
molotovbliss 5y ago
With tracking you kinda need to take that horizontal approach that's very similar in other typical DAWs rotate it. It's 1994, you come across a demo copy off a local BBS of a tracker "tetra compositor" echo.mod playing over the 8bit mono soundblaster that time odd "tracker" made such magic happen. Back in early c64 & Amiga days to achieve a lot of the results you were trying to achieve was how with such limitations. These limitations we're a good reason to posit how to do such. To summarize, trackers have a fairly large cracktro/intro heritage. I mean most trackers from a distance looks like a spreadsheet with codes. A coder approach, as far as implemention goes is a pretty big key difference & the limitations of the time. I'd be more than happy to help any way possible. Avid long time register ReNoise supporter & pusher ;) Since you've got a history with the typical DAW workflow. Eventually you can learn to appreciate the coder centric ux/ui of barely touching your mouse. Kinda like a eclipse ide user finding vim, getting quick ideas down with nothing but a basic ibm keyboard makes it part of the low budget/barrier fun. Long winded nostalgic post ... NO CARRIER

mike_h 5y ago

If the trickiness is from the tracker paradigm, the way I got into it was to take existing projects and study them one track (column) at a time. You can find a bunch at https://modarchive.org/ https://modarchive.org/. Not sure if Renoise is compatible with historical tracker files, but there are links at that site to apps that do.

micklemeal 5y ago

mike_h has some good advice, deconstructing other people's songs is a great way to learn Renoise. The forum was pretty friendly when I was active, and people post examples frequently, so that's a great resource. I also recommend learning the keyboard shortcuts like the back of your hand. It really helps with keeping in flow and is one of the biggest advantages of the tracker interface.

molotovbliss 5y ago
Old mod creator here. (B00MER/kosmic aka kfmf) Most of the fun that disappeared with mp3s is such an ability to deconstruct another's work because of the similar appreciation for the same art. I would spend hours upon hours pouring over any of my favorite tracker artists like keith303, purple motion, lizard king & c.c.catch, etc. even ended up flunking out of high school because the demo scene art subculture was really alluring to my younger self, as it just made sense to me & was something I thoroughly enjoyed. To this day I can typically listen to any song and see the tracks, channels & notes in some regard. If you have no formal background in music but have an itch you can't scratch, explore trackers or even the more popular DAWs like Ableton. There's not much rules, so just have fun. "Even if I'm the last person out there doing it, it's a quiet pursuit. It's, a personal pursuit & it's something that helps me get up in the morning." -dj shadow
- mycall 5y ago
  Old creator here too. I miss the Fast Tracker days. I went so far as to have two Pentium II computers both running Fast Tracker, using MIDI clock sync between them then deconstructing source music from all those favorite tracker artists, playing partial multiple songs at once. It never got old, always fresh each time. Then MP3s came out and the whole concept of trading source music for live remixing was lost. Another amazing thing was how compressed they were. I once put my favorite 1700 S3M/XM/IT/etc songs onto a single CDROM! That in itself is wild to think.

molotovbliss 5y ago

With tracking you kinda need to take that horizontal approach that's very similar in other typical DAWs rotate it. It's 1994, you come across a demo copy off a local BBS of a tracker "tetra compositor" echo.mod playing over the 8bit mono soundblaster that time odd "tracker" made such magic happen. Back in early c64 & Amiga days to achieve a lot of the results you were trying to achieve was how with such limitations. These limitations we're a good reason to posit how to do such. To summarize, trackers have a fairly large cracktro/intro heritage. I mean most trackers from a distance looks like a spreadsheet with codes. A coder approach, as far as implemention goes is a pretty big key difference & the limitations of the time. I'd be more than happy to help any way possible. Avid long time register ReNoise supporter & pusher ;) Since you've got a history with the typical DAW workflow. Eventually you can learn to appreciate the coder centric ux/ui of barely touching your mouse. Kinda like a eclipse ide user finding vim, getting quick ideas down with nothing but a basic ibm keyboard makes it part of the low budget/barrier fun. Long winded nostalgic post ... NO CARRIER