what about trackers ???

drum_master

Member
Joined
Jan 25, 2010
the other day i was on the chatroom in www.bassdrive.com and they started talking about Renoise, (i think its popular among junglists), ive seen a few videos in youtube and looks a bit scary (ive used reason for many years). my cuestion is, do they use a tracker for any other reason than taste? what are the advantages of using a traker sequencer instead of our tradicionals sequencers... any coments?

MD
 
hmm. I started out on a tracker years ago. the only reason i did that was that they were available, most were free (not renoise, i'm talking old school) and they were relatively simple to use. Then I started hearing about these strange things called "vst's" that supposedly made anything sound much better... Modplug tracker had limited vst support (no automations etc) but once i tried fruity i've never gone back.

As I said, renoise is a whole another matter, as from what i've heard its vst support is quite good, the latest version even has a performance matrix! Never tried it, but the basics are the same on trackers. I'm sure there are tutorials for renoise if you want to test it out. I don't think there are that many advantages or disadvantages over other programs or "traditional" producing, it's just a matter of workflow and taste now that everything is 32bit floating point ASIO VSTi 48000 elf crystal teleport brainwaves.

Reactor Grits who often lurks on this here forum said he's using this "tracker vsti" for drums within cubase, but I guess that's also because he's used to that kind of workflow.
 
bahum, thanks for letting me barge in on this one sir.
I actually started making music on trackers since around those days (which is ancient times) there was nothing really much else to make music on if you only had a pc and no synths, samplers and fx units (hardware!) since you were a kid and couldn't barely afford a pack of fags. And like kama said, when vst's came knocking around 10 years ago, most people who used trackers stepped over to fruity, cubase, reason etc. since these handled vst's and the only tracker that did eventually was modplug tracker and pretty shakey like kama also stated. i thought it sucked because I, for myself, am a 100% sure that making beats in a tracker gives more detail and innovation to them than in audiolanes or piano rolls. flame me down, but I tried it all and nothing can convince me otherwise.
anyway, since then trackers SEEMED to have been an oldskool thing, but since the steady rise of Renoise, the last couple of years tracking is going through a massive revival. The Renoise community is growing massively and many professional artists use it with the same results in quality as any professional daw. me myself don't use renoise but a VSTi plugin called Revisit, which is cool imo since you can combine it with your own daw of choice and can choose whether to sequence horizontally or vertically. for example, some things like melodic stuff I can still do in the piano roll in the host, but other things like beatmaking I do in Revisit which is seamlessly synced with my host, that can trigger it's patterns by MIDI.
I put up a post about Revisit in the 'Cheap / Free alternatives to commonly warezed programs' sticky on the top of this forum if you want to check it out.
 
Last edited:
i use renoise and i love it sooooo much. the quality is amazing, you can use vst and vsti's and anything else you can think of (although i think it may have trouble with sidechain compression).
The only issue i have with renoise is i want to put swing on my beats and the renoise swing is universal not just individual tracks like reason.
Otherwise i find it to be far more logical to sequence in. Once you get your head around it, its soo simple.

Im pretty sure ASC uses it but im not sure how many other dnb artists do, although its a breeze chopping up beats jungle style.

The one other thing i wish you could do it automate the sample loop length, then I'd have total controll.

BTW Reactor Grits, how would you recomend going about making snare rush's like Aphex Twin or squarepusher in renoise??
I could change the resolution and tempo but im trying to find another way around it.

trackers ftw
 
I'm not a very thorough Renoise user, however there must be a command called 'retrigger' that triggers a sample multiple times per row, maybe that helps. I myself just use double length patterns at double speed to get this resolution.
 
I use Renoise, and can honestly now say, functionality wise there is almost no diffference between this Tracker and any other horizontal sequencer. It can do sidechain compression now, proper one. Chopping up beats is possibly the easiest things ive ever done in renoise, and then rearranging them with even having to click the mouse is just amazing.

And i don't understand how people say the VST support is "pretty good". Its as good as any other sequencers and the automation is fully functional. Internal fx are top notch, OSC support in the pipeline.

The newest version is about to get out beta in the next couple of months so be sure to check there site for an updated demo, but for now check the demo now.

http://www.renoise.com/download/renoise/

videos: http://www.renoise.com/about/videos/

Its fully functional apart from you can't render your song/samples which is a fairly essential apart of the working process, but most sequencers only let you go for half an hour and cut you out. You can even save your file in the renoise demo! Just have a go instead of being sceptical, and then you can criticize.
 
lo wasn't meant personally to anyone here! Just at people who see a tracker and go ewwww, i want cubase cos thats what mistabishi uses (or whoever) and i'm not going to try anything else.

P.S what do i need to prove?
 
I started out with I think Fasttracker about 10 years ago, switched to Fruityloops 2.5 about 2 months after that.
Know I'm still working in FL Studio, I'm just not down with trackers! :P
 
Back
Top Bottom