Come feel Renoise

Trackers! A new way of thinking about music! For me, as a classically trained musician, my main purpose in studying electronic music is to make music from a new perspective.

Now, while I use scores and notes in my daily work as a choral conductor and arranger of choral music, I use piano-rolls when working with FLStudio. But FLStudio has, just like Finale, a horizontal workflow. Trackers, OTOH, work with vertical rows and with hexadecimal note-entries.

I have Buzz Machines, Madtracker and Renoise installed on My Computer, but until now they seemed very arcane to me. I thought I’d prefer Buzz Machines, because it is modular, like EnergyXT, and completely free. But: starting with #128, Computer Music publishes a monthly workshop “Totally Trackers”, working with Renoise. So now I’m getting the hang of it: here is a small and casual result, just to keep track of my own progress.

Another great monthly workshop I follow in CM – if time permits –  is Scot Solida’s “Synth Esentials”. In #132 he explains how to make a plucked string patch in Oxe FM Synth, a great free VST plug-in. Great; until now I always used only the presets of my synths, but of course that’s not where a synth is made for.

In the meantime, I’m working on another project in FLStudio, but that’s not finished yet.

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  • The Aesthetics and Beauty of Knowledge

    Shih was the opposite of facts and raw information; shih was the elegance of knowledge, the insight and skill to organize knowledge into meaningful patterns. As an artist chooses colours or light to make her pictures, a master of shih chooses textures of knowledge – various ideas, myths, abstractions, and theories – to create a way of seeing the world. The aesthetics and beauty of knowledge – this was shih.

    – David Zindell, The Broken God, 1993

  • Geek Attitude

    The attitude thing is about flexibility, portability, creativity, sociability and jamming (ran out of suitable “ity” words!). It’s about improvising – in the practical and musical senses of the word; not getting tangled in boundaries and the “right” way to do things.
    Definitely the only way to travel.
    Martin Delaney – “Laptop Music”.