A quick look at the Renoise tool I created to automate the building of a song from recorded narration. This is especially time saving when dealing with necessary edits after the initial renders.

Bringing forward an old riff into new music creates an issue, which reminds me about problems with certain ways of generating sounds. This is demonstrated in various versions of Renoise, going back to v1.9.

This video is an accompaniment to the Compression video released on the official Renoise channel. In it I ramble on without a script while trying to keep things technically accurate with regards to the Renoise compressors.

Many features of Renoise & Redux are only made possible by taking advantage of the fact that you’re using a computer to create music. However, just like the oldest tracker programs, Renoise & Redux still use the traditional 12-note western scale used for acoustic instruments. As you’d expect though, there are options to control how this works.

If you’ve worked with audio then you probably know about compressing the volume of waveforms. However, the results of compression are not as musically obvious as other effects like reverb or distortion, so unless you know what’s actually happening to the sound it can be a little confusing and lead to some incorrect assumptions about the use and misuse of compressors. So let’s take a look at how this works in Renoise and Redux.

I was commissioned to create an introduction video for Fileside, a modern multi-pane file management app for Mac and Windows that gives you complete layout control. Fileside shows the file system in its entirety, addressing the constant need to open multiple windows, navigate to the locations you need in each one, then painstakingly resize and arrange them side-by-side to start moving files around.

There are lots of ways of introducing randomness across the various features of Renoise and Redux. But what if you generated changes at random initially and you like what you heard, so you want those changes to be the same each time the song is played?

As shown in the Beginner’s Tutorial, automating track effects is done with effect commands and graphical automation. You can also use those methods to automate effects contained within an instrument by ‘Using Macros’. Obviously that requires you to manually create those automations across the entire song. However, there is a different technique where everything works automatically.

As their names suggest, the Key and Velocity Trackers accept as inputs: key (or ‘note’) values, and velocity (or ‘volume’) values. The devices then process this input through various options to create an output, which is used to control a Destination parameter.

There’s some interesting stuff going on in the instruments of my Mutant Breaks 13 song, so I made the first unscripted video since the SDEK stuff back in 2009. I’ll be doing more of this kind of thing soon. The song file is available for download.