Simple Pianoroll Tool for Renoise

Videos on Youtube

Showing version 2.0 in action:

Older ones

Thread on official Renoise forum

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

Features

• 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...

Important

• 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.
• 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.

Note rendering in piano roll

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

Note overlapping

Note cut fx

Note retrigger fx

Note delay

Note delay for note off

Different instruments in one pattern

Install and Update

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:

How to use it

General

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.

Open the piano roll

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.

Pattern editor

Matrix view

Scale highlighting

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.

Ghost track

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.

Step sequencing with computer keyboard

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.

Histogram

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:

Chord detection and scale degree detection

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.

Chord stamping

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.

Mouse actions

Keyboard actions

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.

Nothing selected

One or more notes selected