⚠️ This README is currently outdated. Will be updated soon.

• Videos on Youtube
  • Older ones
• Thread on official Renoise forum
• Features
• Important
• Note rendering in piano roll
  • Note overlapping
  • Note cut fx
  • Note retrigger fx
  • Note delay
  • Note delay for note off
  • Different instruments in one pattern
• Install and Update
• How to use it
  • General
  • Eraser sub mode
  • Open the piano roll
    • Pattern editor
    • Matrix view
  • Note preview
  • Timeline bar
  • Scale highlighting
  • Ghost track
    • Chord ghost track
  • Step sequencing with computer keyboard
  • Histogram
  • Chord detection and scale degree detection
  • Chord stamping
• Mouse actions
• Keyboard actions
  • Nothing selected
  • One or more notes selected
• Inbuilt additional tools
  • Sample Editor - Fit sample to beat sync ...
    • Sample Editor - Fit sample to beat sync (Song BPM)
  • Sample Editor - Align sample selection to beat
  • Instrument box - Change instruments global pitch
  • Matrix view - Duplicate content
  • Useful global keyboard shortcuts
    • Audio reference switch
    • Sub Filter switch
    • Show / Hide Analyzer
    • Show / Hide Waveform Analyzer
  • Other tools via main menu
    • Upgrade filters of all instruments

Showing version 5.3 in action:

v2.0:

v0.7:

v0.1:

https://forum.renoise.com/t/simple-pianoroll-com-duftetools-simplepianoroll-xrnx/63034

• Piano roll workflow (inspired by FL piano roll)
• Mouse support for note moving, scaling and drawing
• Mouse scroll wheel support for scrolling through grid or change the velocity of selected notes
• Follows Renoise user interface scaling option
• Polyphony support (automatically adds and remove note columns, if needed)
• Note preview via Renoise inbuild OSC Server
• Ghost Track
• Many useful mouse and keyboard shortcuts (inspired by FL, Bitwig, Ableton and Reason)
• Show several tracker related effects like note cut, note retrigger, delay
• Scale highlighting support (None, Minor scale, Major scale, Instrument scale, Automatic scale)
• Many useful options to change the behavior for your own taste
• Chord detection for playing and selected notes
• Chord stamping
• Tool Updater support
• Step sequencing via computer keyboard
• Histogram for note property manipulations
• Basic MIDI Input support for playing (no recording yet)
• And more...

• To improve mouse handling, please disable mouse warping in Renoise preferences. This also fix the jumping mouse cursor. There is an option called "Mouse warping compatibility mode", if you still want to use mouse warping in Renoise. It will disable some internal functions, where disabled mouse warping is needed.
• For note preview, you need to enable the OSC server in the Renoise preferences. Be sure, that protocol and port are correctly set for both the OSC server and the piano roll.
• The key combination alt + shift is a default shortcut to change the keyboard layout on Windows OS. It is recommended to switch this off or change the keyboard shortcut to avoid problems.
  See following for more details: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-to-disable-the-windows-10-language-shortcut/030016c9-bfed-48d9-8e4f-7d1030ced338
• Renoise have a 12 column limit per tack. So when more than 12 columns are needed, then some notes will stick in the current position. A hint should be displayed in Renoise toolbar.

It supports different note column effects, and it will also use different note colors, when more than one instrument was used in the pattern.

Download the latest version from official tool page:
https://www.renoise.com/tools/simple-pianoroll

Alternative download the latest build here and drop it onto Renoise (beta build):
https://github.com/ryrun/com.dufte.SimplePianoroll.xrnx/blob/master/out/com.duftetools.SimplePianoroll.xrnx

Tool updater is supported, so when a new version is released, it should show you an update prompt.

More information about how you can install and update Renoise tools:

Everyone who is familiar with a piano roll, can use it right away. It's heavily inspired by FL, Bitwig and Reason. DAW's which I've used in the past. Most common keyboard shortcuts of these like ctrl+b or ctrl+d for note duplication are working here, too.

When you hold the mouse button on note deletion and move, you can remove others notes, too. It will internally swap to the eraser mode, you can see in the toolbar, where the pen tool icon swaps to “X”.

There are several ways to open the piano roll. It's possible in the pattern view, matrix view, mixer view, instruments pane and also via main menu.

With the help of Renoise's OSC server it is possible to play the drawn as well as selected notes. You can also use your computer keyboard to play notes. The keys are the same as on the Renoise Tracker. With the preview tool you can scroll through the pattern and play all notes at the respective position. By default, the OSC server is turned off, so you have to activate it first. Furthermore, the protocol and the port number must match the settings of the Pianoroll tool. After that it should work immediately.

With the timeline bar it is possible to set, move or remove loop areas. To draw in a loop, simply hold down the ctrl key and mark the desired area with the left mouse button pressed. If the shift key is pressed, the loop area can be moved. While the song is playing and the play point is outside the loop on the right, it will be moved back into the loop automatically. Double click removes the current loop. Single click sets the editor cursor positions.

Made a Youtube short about this, so you can see it in action:

Scale highlighting can be easily changed with the button on the bottem left. It opens a dialog, where you can switch between major or minor or change the root key.

With a ghost track, you can easily set note guidelines for composing. Simply choose a track, and you will see the notes in the piano roll background. With enabled mirroring, every note of your selected track will be spread across all octaves. So manually copy or transpose notes across octaves is not needed anymore. There is also a button to easily switch between the current and the ghost track.

When no ghost track target is set, you can enable the ghost chord track. It’s using the lowest note as the first note of a chord and showing your notes above it as ghost to, so you create a chord very fast. I used it alot lately for chord melodies.

In Renoise, you can use your computer keyboard to play notes. This is also possible in the piano roll. So, when you play and hold notes and use the cursor keys left or right to move the edit cursor, it will create or remove notes on the current cursor position. You can also use your midi kleyboard to play a chords and use the cursor keys to draw them, when you have seleted the midi in device in the preferences.

The histogram shows you note values (volume, panning, delay and pitch) of your current note selection in a simple graph. It can be used to add randomness to your notes. It's inspired by Bitwig's powerful histogram feature.

There are 4 controls to manipulate these values:

• Offset is used to move the values up or down.
• Scale can be used to grow or shrink the spread across the x-axis. It can also be used to mirror the values via negative scale values.
• Chaos can be used to add randomness to each value.
• Asc by Pos / Note can be used to ascending or descending the values by note position or by note pitch.

With Apply the values will be written. With Reset the histogram controls will be set back to defaul values.

Here a little video showing you, how you can use it:

The piano roll will always try to detect chords of the current selected or played notes. It also tries to determine the correct scale degree depending on the current scale. It can be used to unterstand music theory better and gives you more information about the current playing notes.

With the chord stamping you can easily draw chords into the piano roll. The selected chord can be extended by further notes or chord inversion can be performed. If the note preview has been activated, the drawing in of chords can also be done via step sequencing. In addition, it is possible that the drawn chords are always aligned to the currently active scale. Finally, ChordGun chord templates can be read and used, too.

Info: Non handled keyboard events will be sent back to the host. So renoise default keyboard shortcuts should work.

About AZERTY keyboard layout: AZERTY mode in the preferences will internally convert non number keys to number keys. So you don't need to hold shift.

I've added some of my internal tools, which improved my workflow in Renoise alot. I don't want to mantain more than one tool, so I've added them to this tool instead. The context menu ones are optional and disabled by default. You need to enable them in the piano roll settings (restart of Renoise is needed).

This tool helps you to calculate the correct beat sync value for timestretching of loops and set it. It tries to detect the correct BPM by the sample length in samples. Please note that the beat sync value also use your lines per beat song parameter. So this parameter shouldn't be automated in your song. When you select a part of your sample (from snare to snare) to manually select a 4 bar loop, because the sample is longer, it's using the selection length for calculation. It'll also extend the sample, when the calculated beat sync value is not a whole number. Float numbers for the beat sync parameter is currently not supported in Renoise.

Instead of calculate the correct BPM of a sample, it uses the current Song BPM. You can use it for one shot synth for pitch shifting. Or you can create some glitchy sounds, when you automate the line per beat parameter of your song. Set a quite high LPB value, 16 for example. Then just load some drum sounds like kick / snare and hihats. Apply the "Fit sample to beat sync (Song BPM)" to each drum sample. Now create a simple drum pattern and use the ZLxx parameter to automate / change the line per beats in some parts of your loop.

This idea is inspired by a song from suunk. Here is a good interview about his technique:

This tool helps you to align swoops or risers in your song. You set the selection cursor to a point of your riser sample, where the crash would hit, and then you choose how many lines you would use for the "rising"-part fit in. So, when you choose 32 lines, the "tail" part of the riser should be played from line 33. This can also be used on reverse crash samples, when you want to have it exaclty 32 lines long for your song.

With this function it's possible to change the instrument pitch of several instrument at once. Because of the current API limitations, it's not possible to use the instrument selection. Instead, its using empty instruments as selection borders. So, when you group your instruments and want to change the pitch of these in one step, it's possible now.

I often want to duplicate a whole pattern. So a 64 pattern can be enlarged to a 128 pattern and the content will be duplicated. Just right-click on a pattern and choose "Duplicate content ...".

Some useful keyboard shortcuts for mixing and analysing. These can be found under "Global \ Simple Pianoroll - Workflow Tools". Supported plugins are currently limited. Other plugins can be added via feature requests.

Switch between Renoise song and a Reference song in your plugin on a master channel. Supported plugins currently are:

• MeldaProduction: MCompare
• Plugin Alliance: ADPTR MetricAB

Enable / disable sub only filter on master channel for checking sub frequencies. Supported plugins currently are:

• MeldaProduction: MCompare
• Plugin Alliance: ADPTR MetricAB

Show or Hide the audio analyzer plugin on the master channel. Supported plugins currently are:

• Voxengo: SPAN
• Plugin Alliance: ADPTR MetricAB

Show or Hide the waveform analyzer plugin on the master channel. Supported plugins currently are:

• Xfer Records: LFOTool_x64
• Cableguys: ShaperBox 3

A small tool to upgrade old Renoise filters in instruments to the new one. Can also be used to enable anti aliasing in all samples.