Quick and dirty Renoise utility for making it easy to play around with sliced breakbeats turned into phrases via Selection -> Render to slices.
This tool is very much inspired by the excellent BreakPal.
Download the latest version from Releases. Double-click the XRNX or drag it into your Renoise instance to install it.
See Groovin in G's excellent video on how to turn breakbeats into phrases in Renoise. This reconstructs the original breakbeat using your slices, and allows you to easily apply modulations like volume ADSRs and filters to individual hits.
There's a catch: What if you want to trigger the breakbeat from a specific point, like a shuffle or juicy kick? If you simply copy-paste those parts into a new phrase, your timing will be off, as the delay column is used to express the original groove. Usually you end up resampling or quantizing by hand.
This tool solves that problem by yoinking, removing any delay from the first hit, then adjusting the delays of subsequent hits. You can then use this to carve out parts of the original break and create nice, snappy phrases that are easy to trigger when making breakcore, while still being able to modulate the hits as desired.
This tool adds new features to the menu in the phrase editor (right-click):
- Yoink from every note creates individual phrases starting at each subsequent slice, containing the remainder of the phrase. This is great for jams and recreates the experience of playing around with individual slices, but with the benefit of being able to modulate every slice.
- Selection -> Yoink into new phrase
- Selection -> Loop/unloop. This is mostly to make it easy to select parts of the phrase, inspect it and then optionally yoink it into a new phrase.
- Yoink and yoink into new phrase are mostly useful for fixing phrases created by manually copying and pasting phrases.
If yoinking creates a new phrase, empty lines in the beginning will be removed.
If the playback mode is set to keymap, the new phrase is mapped into an unused note. This is done in order to make it easy and convenient to play around with your new phrases.
- Chop your break as usual with slices in Renoise. Feel free to be precise and slice up individual roll hits, since this tool makes it easy to trigger them!
- Click Modulation and add some pitch adjustments, volume ADSR etc. until you like what you're hearing when playing the slices manually.
- Right click the waveform and select Slices -> Render to slices
- Go into the phrase editor by clicking Phrases
- Sonic mode: Enable keymap in the bottom right, right click phrase, Yoink from every note and start mashing your keyboard or MIDI controller.
- Snippet curation mode: Find a nice shuffle. Use Selection -> Loop/unloop
to make sure the selection sounds good. Selection -> Yoink into new phrase.
- Select Transpose as your key tracking mode. Set the base note to something that sounds cool. Increase the width of the area in the piano roll allocated to your phrase. Congratulations, you can now play a cool Amen shuffle at multiple pitches. For good measure, duplicate it and make multiple copies with half and twice the LPB.
This is a PoC tool and only lightly tested. If you see any unexpected behavior, please create an issue and let me know. Please include a description of the problem, and if possible a copy of the phrase or instrument with the issue.