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For hardware definitely try - Akai MPC series and NI Maschine to see which ones fit your style and tastes. For midi keyboard controllers there are many and recent ones from Alesis with the built in 16 pad controller are pretty darn good. M Audio Code midi keyboard is also feature rich. Korg Triton Taktile is very good too. Roland Fantom series are evergreen in the beatmaking world.For softwares and comparison I have tried to highlight them below. But if you are a tracker musician already then I highly recommend you to keep at it, since things are too good now to ever shift gears unless its a personal preference change rather than a practical one as you might conclude after you read this. There are many reasons why trackers have been one of the best discoveries of my life, and I use everything btw (i.e I am not a fanboy to begin with).Renoise is one of the most quickest and efficient way of making music. I produced my first EP entirely in Reason 2.5 and Ableton 5 many years back when these versions were new. I used Sonar and FLStudio extensively for another local PC based music project. I used Logic Pro and Cubase extensively for a remix project few years ago. You could try other alternatives like Geist and Geist 2 or the older Guru all from FXpansion. They are kindof unique in their own right and very capable for beatmaking. BPM from MOTU is also a good software which I have never used and it is kindof stigmatized at this point for various reasons like software bugs or lack of proper support or even updates from MOTU. But from the demos I have seen its actually very pretty looking and sounds bang on right out of the box, which is a great point btw cos a lot of DAWs do not come with pro grade sound right off the bat. I wish more and more people used this so that MOTU has an incentive to make the version 2.If sample based music is all you want - I suppose even Sony Acid works just fine. But that is where you need to make the decision of what tools fit you - rather than trying to fit yourself to other tools - it is very easy to fragment your workflow and requires discipline to stay streamlined.Workflow thing - Does dragging piano roll notes to length and zooming in and out often bore you to death? Does precise edits get you geared up mentally for a gym session since it takes a lot of patience and mouse clicks masquerading as hard work and time to get those done? Fixed FX inserts for every instrument track like a traditional mixer and staying that way, do you envision a flexible mixer setup? Does horizontal scroll take its toll on you after doing it years together? Are you good with text and numbers and crave absolute precision? If you answers to the questions are yes above average then you should go for Renoise.The other answer why Renoise is that mostly every other DAW at its overview mostly uses the same features and do the same thing - in terms of having a piano roll, or drum sampler, automation curves etc. Tape recording like emulation done in software, same thing really. Renoise will make you reliant on yourself and your skills will stay sharp and not dependent on all spoonfed colors and tags and templates and labels and mouse hover menus. Cooking up functionality and force feeding features just to get you to buy their latest is not the best use of your time if you buy into it. Gear lust is well known, I would call this feature lust. Mostly you are just avoiding learning to play an instrument properly or delve deeper into music theory and banking on the next hyped bell and whistle to take your music to the next level - if you really think features will improve your songwriting. In fact the current set of software have enough to write any kind of music without buying the next version at all. You could use the software written in 1997 to write your next hit if you wanted to. Most of the really important features constitute like 13% to 23% of the your total feature set. The bulk of the rest of the features are there just cos the programmers could program it - not cos you need it or even want it. Their job apart from innovation which is welcome, is also feature generation and marketing so that you are convinced that you really need the latest sound or plugin or else your music would suck. If you go by those standards then every yesteryear hit does not merit validity because they were all made on defunkt or aging gear that are decades old already. This is the beauty of the tracker approach as its basically still the same thing it was when it first began, like true friends, it curates its features like a wise and discrete person and does not let all and sundry become part of its exclusive circle - that way keeping things very high quality and not trying to sell on quantity. Think about it.ABLETONPros : Ableton is great if you are into remixing mostly because of the Time Warp feature. It is also good for beatmaking projects since the rack can hold a large number of samples which is great especially for Akai MPC like feel or 16 pad controller based production workflow. The macros are great for controlling parameters on the fly and the name “Live” itself says it all when it comes to performance related ease of use. The inbuilt sampler is very capable indeed.Scenes and pattern blocks in a very “visual” UI sets the bar for ease of use.Cons: Ableton has a distinct sonic signature to its DSP algorithms, in fact you can tell what tracks were produced with Ableton very easily. Same with FL Studio. Its not a bad thing really but it kindof taints everything you do. A neutral sounding engine would be so much better dont you think?Large sample conversions and exporting is buggy and many files get corrupted.Ableton is largely now what I would consider as bloatware.Ableton is certainly not a keyboard friendly UI as everything needs the mouse or a dedicated controller like Push.The piano roll is the only midi interface where you can interact with the notes and its not too fluid like the piano roll in FLStudio. It is clunky especially when using with a single mouse and keyboard setup. Always the external something required to fully augment the already given setup.No Score or Event list for finer controls.SONARIt is good for what it does and the UI has refreshingly changed for more modern tastes. It is a well engineered product nonetheless and the company tries to put everything as well as the kitchen sink to augment the feature set. It tries to be a one stop shop for everything audio and midi related and judging by the set of plugins and instruments offered is a very well spent investment for someone looking to do music production on Windows based PCs. Magix, a software company in Dresden, also produces software on these lines for the PC albeit in a light weight fashion at least by Cakewalk Sonar standards. Magix is huge in Europe where the market is more suited to European tastes and supporting local economy. Germany ranks very high when it comes to software development standards. However, I find it too heavy for my uses and mostly they all work the same way.All the DAW’s from Ableton, Sonar, FLStudio, Protools, Reason, DP, Cubase — they all work on the visual “draw your music” kind of interactive way which might look interesting in the beginning but after more than a decade of seeing the same stuff, I am finally quite fed up with this “paint your music blocks” method of music production. Always needing a mouse, and too many shortcuts to remember all the while when using a mouse, which defeats the benefit of having two tools with twice the number of movements and shortcuts to remember. This is what I could call software based cognitive music programming. Most of us did it or are doing it for two main reasons - 1) we were brought up in this environment where the tools indoctrinated us with a simpler interface, the piano roll as opposed to number lists which are too technical or 2) an alternative to the sheet music which ironically is too musically advanced for the folk or audience which uses ”modern” sequencing software.FLSTUDIOFLStudio is used by many samplists and beatmakers. End of the day its a very capable software package. Nothing inherently wrong with it, except for the sound signature. You can tell a song was made in FLStudio. The sequencer could be better and more intuitive beyond just the piano roll feature set which is one of the best, but still - paint by numbers piano roll - all needing a clickfest. I love the dark themed interface but little has changed actually, more candy fillers and less new stuff. Also having a gazillion synths to generate the same old square and triangle wave does not do much for me. However, I find the interface very intuitive and responsive. It is stable and has a dedicated following. Still, paint by colored blocks style, no score and event list to work in detail. Many features are hidden away in the background menus and I don’t find it very inviting to click my way to everything. FLStudio is as good as a clickfest if you are a mouse user. Certainly will not work without a mouse.REASONReason is the only package that breaks form the existing DAW paradigm by having a more hardware rack like approach with virtual cabling and all. But end of the day, it is still a paint by visual colored blocks programming approach. Innovative in presentation but still the same at the core. No event list. No score and no music data manipulation primitives like chord analysis (earlier version did not have this). No VST support (things are changing though with extensions and recent vst support added - after so many years). No waveform editing. Its like Apple for beatmaking. You can use this but no external tools. Only rex and rex2 loops, and mostly sounds from Refills. This exclusivity has got Reason some notoriety and hate but lots of love as well. I certainly enjoyed Reason all these years. But combinating things to death and with the Kong drum machine not being an ideal MPC replacement I have started to look elsewhere for some years now. I don’t find the sequencer too engaging either. The multiple lanes approach is so archaic left to right traditional tape based recording emulation. Instead of doing multiple lanes if they can focus on phrases and phrase triggering for complicated scores, along with a capable Kong with single note output and other MPC like features, only then I will return back. Their audio engine also has a noticeable lack in punch and I have to always rewire it through Ableton to get it to thump in the natural state without compression. Reason was fun, but I am moving on baby.MINI HISTORYNowadays, the beatmaking tools and techniques have gained reputation for being an efficient and homegrown culture to make music, similar to turntablism where the intended tool is implemented in an ingenious fashion that set the standards for an alternative form of modern music production. The hip hop and beatmaking community have been doing this for decades and only now is the light being shed in a more global fashion about the benefits of having an MPC like workflow or a more sample based production toolkit as a viable means of music production.Similarly, trackers are software sequencers that have had a smaller but dedicated audience that have seen the evolution of this ingenious tool that is a technical take on music production that is geared for computer performance efficiency as a first priority. Trackers make the best use of features in sound chips and the small amount of memory in older computers in the pre -PC era. After about 30 years of evolution from the first trackers - Fasttracker, Impulse tracker, Buzz machines, Octamed and so many others in variety of platforms from the Amiga to the Mac, trackers will always be there because of the inherent simplicity and DNA shared with computer - processing long lists of data - both in the presentation and its implementation and approach. Just ask anyone from the demoscene and chiptune scene about the technical aspects of creating in such a platform and for such a global audience. It is a little skewed towards the Scandinavia demographics but so is beatmaking in its New York ghetto roots.In fact these are as polar opposites as they get - 1) Scandinavian White demographic with their fascination with old computers and tracker music and assembly programmed graphic demos. Not to mention things like virus writing, cracking warez scenes and cyber culture in general. Music was just a part of it, big one nonetheless. The kids who used all these were from the middle class and neither dirt poor nor extravagantly rich for the most part. Many of them who used trackers could barely afford a midi keyboard in those years and hence the standard tracker programming interface being the computer keyboard itself. Makes sense does it not?2) Black American and Latino demographics who ingeniously used turntables and commercially failed drum machines (TR 808/909) and older sequencers and adopt the MPC to create and evolve a culture that involves dance, rap and beatmaking. Boys are mostly from the ghetto or socially challenged backgrounds in 1970’s America. It is a big business now and a global culture.Ableton/Reason are very late comers in this regards. Logic and Cubase existed way back too (had different names like C lab Notator and different companies like Emagic). MPC was there in the late 1980s and has continued to evolve since. Trackers were there since the 1980s.BEATMAKINGThe primary functions of any beatmaking setup -Sampler and sampling, including recording from external sourcesSample slicing, keyzones, groups, FX, modulationSequencing, layering, compression techniques (parallel, New York), EQ, Delay, Reverb, Chorus, Dirt (Lo-fi), glitch and stutterSwing and quantizationDrums and drum kitsBassKeysPads/StringsSynthGuitarVocalsPlugin supportResamplingFX routingLet us see how many of these features are handled in Renoise. BTW the sounds part is mostly taken care of by line-in input or sample libraries or external microphone recording. All of this has built in support in Renoise. So is the VST plugin support and resampling and FX routing etc… all in the list actually. Let us delve into deeper detail into more of its important features.RENOISEThere are quite many features that make Renoise adept at sample based music.For a quick overview of the benefits-a. Extremely tight integrated and powerful multi featured samplerThis is not a sampler module or “insert a sampler” BS. The Renoise instrument IS the sampler, every one of them. That, and augmented with VSTi plugins, phrase generator and bank, and fx and parameter modulation bundled all together into a singular entity - the Renoise Instrument. You can trigger samples, slice them, wave edit them, draw them, generate them, make custom keyzones and splits and drum kits and layer it with a Kontakt VSTi and trigger the sounds via the per instrument/sampler integrated phrase generator. All this in one Renoise instrument. See the power already?Every other DAW has to go round and about “creating” a sampler instrument VSTi insert as separate entities from separate menus. And they are all track bound from the outset. You can use multi out, which you can in Renoise as well, but decoupling, I have not yet seen in any other DAW. Since you never see it, you also don’t know what you are missing with using other DAWs - all of which inclusively use the now uibiquitous piano roll. Renoise exclusively does NOT use a piano roll. So everyone excited to paint won’t get to paint, but if you wanna stay sharp on ears and numbers, you are more than welcome.Timestretching (2 types - slicing and pitch shifted) is done by converting slices to a phrase keeping the groove intact and tempo independent. Similar to rex but way more customizable without having to run Recycle. In Renoise, Recycle like functionality is built in with automatic transient detection, slice editing and rendering. Beatsync is a one button click to pitch shifted time stretching for the more vintage sounding version of time stretch. The rubber band plugin for Renoise gets time stretching done in a very streamlined manner giving Renoise inherent time stretching support.Autoseek is a great added feature to work with longer samples so that you dont have to retrigger them. In Reason every vocal sample done this way has to be retriggered. In other DAWs the only way you can use long vocal lines this way is to put them in the vanilla Audio Track to see the waveform view. What Autoseek feature in Renoise does is make the sample playable with relation to its intended playback position in the song while interacting with the patterns or moving through the song forward or backward. This way you do not skip a vocal and you dont need to retrigger it for any reason. Plus it keeps you ears active.Transport is really intuitive using just the Spacebar, Enter and arrow keys or the mouse scroll, which possibly is the best use of mouse with Renoise. Just scroll up and down to move the transport without searching for the forward backward buttons while pointing to the transport panel. No need for dedicated button shortcuts to start playback - Spacebar starts the pattern from the beginning, SHIFT+Spacebar from the current pattern position. Record is the Esc key. Metronome is the ~ key. You could master this in 2 minutes if you had to.A fun side effect of scrolling transport is that you can use the mouse scroll wheel like a simulated turntable for fun or repeating short phrases of the song.Reading text is way more comfortable than visual shapes on the screen, especially since it works so well for software like Excel and its second nature to all of us anyways. Notation score is also very fast for music composition once you have spent the time learning it already. But apart from that benefit of using scores and music notation the zoom factor for beatmaking is invalid when it comes to traditional scores as such, because much is actually left to interpretation to the performer - notation was not designed with the modern production facilities in mind so you do not traditionally have signs and symbols for filter sweeps or eq notches - it is musician oriented and a machine would be very static playing a rather rigid interpretation of the composers idea.b. Sound engine is pristineNo tainting and sounds very “pure”. Quite a few DAW engines suffer from either low power or a signature sound that taints every track you produce.c. Super workflow and time save for really precise and microscopic event editsIn every other DAW the insert FX is the only way you can manage and modulate FX for a track, without having sample/note specific modulation options. Think about this - for every effect you need, you must invoke a new FX plugin and insert it in the bound track to the instrument/VSTi. In Renoise, you can do this without a doubt as usual, however, the prime workflow benefit is that you have textual commands which are short and specific codes for invoking internally built FX for any note event in the song. This is not just the usual time domain or freq domain fx but also things for tempo change and time signature change or song transport between patterns among many others. They look like this - ZTXX where the XX is a placeholder for hex values like 7E. That one line effectively changes the project tempo wherever you place it. Forget about automation curves for the time being (which you can do in Renoise as well), and think about what you have just done using only a keyboard and the time it took to do it. Commands like R03 does a snare roll triplet without volume change that takes a couple of seconds what you would spend atleast a good 15 -20 minutes perfecting it in the DAW piano roll. This is the mentality of tracker musicians who have mastered the art of time saving in the technical domain. More important its done unconsciously because the mechanism is built into the software architecture itself.d. No zoom requiredTrackers will understand this more than other DAW user because we do not have a zoom feature. You will not believe how much time is saved and how convenient this feature lack is there of. Sarcasm there - the pattern resolution in a tracker and in Renoise is the highest resolution by default. The Lines itself is one atomic time event. The only thing you do not get to zoom further is the ticks per line 1–16 range. The line itself is the highest resolution. For drum breaks other DAW users will be familiar with the 16 sequencer mode like in 909 drum machine as well as using the piano roll for deeper edits and constantly zooming in and out for more detailed edits. Why is this so? Because the zoom is always an impediment to your intimateness with the drum event placement. Just look at how disconnected Ableton and other pattern editors from other DAWs implement this -You usually have like an overview where you have to click and drag up or down and sideways to pan and zoom from the same position. This overview bar is usually separate from the main event editor which needs the mouse. In Reason you have shortcuts on the keyboard and the magnifying glass buttons to repeatedly click or a zoom bar again to click and drag. If you think pressing + and - repeatedly helps your creativity when you need to constantly see the overview and the detail and bounce between them, you must be mistaken for sure. After years of working this way, Renoise and its pattern window (pattern list or overview) and pattern editor (note/fx entry) have greatly helped me reducing needless and repetitive strokes and mouse movements by leaps and bounds. I truly hate the way zoom is enabled and even required in DAWs, especially horizontal zoom. Renoise has NO horizontal zoom where it matters most (and other places too)- the pattern editor. Actually this unique UI/UX benefits has to be experienced first hand and will take a relatively short while to get accustomed to, since we have had our brains rewired to be a little comatose and over reliant on mouse clicks and drags. The waveform editor has the expected horizontal panning because it is kinda needed and still you can have absolute control using the keyboard only, including panning, zooming and selection.For those of you who are in technical computing you might have heard about the tool OllyDBG which is a Windows based debugger, and Renoise reminds me of the UI benefits in many ways - quick, responsive, modular windows/views split in one screen yet all in sync and very detail oriented. In OllyDbg you normally get to work at the lowest or most atomic level of computer program execution - each assembly instruction, which leaves no room for any interpretation as such since there is no further zoom level. If you can take data like that an work at it - it becomes second nature after a while and that is what I am talking about. Precision.Drum tracks in particular look so well laid out in this format. You see every ghosted snare, rolled kick, every retrigger, every tempo change, right where it happens, without opening a second automation view or zooming in to see more detail. Once you get acquainted with this unique ability of Renoise to make sequences appear super detailed you will doubtfully go back to the regular boring and time consuming way of piano roll drum programming or button based 16 button drum programming usual techniques.For things like 5/4 or 7/4 beat or custom swing, just how easy to do it in other DAWs? Real simple in Renoise, but I need you to discover this for yourself since its so intuitive you would not miss it if you play around just for a bit. For Neo-soul and hip hop/jazz breaks Renoise is so reliable and precise for such things. The additional note delay column for every note can be edited like in FLStudio sequencer or Geist software from FXpansion or modulated by Renoise features like Render Slices to Phrase or other Renoise plugins (called Tools). Timing is big strength in Renoise because the resolution of a measure down to the beat and further down to the atomic line and even still the tick is a built in brilliance.Best workflow improvement = screw the mouse for such things.e. Efficient application and no memory overhead that hogs resource.f. Works in Windows, Mac and Linux.g. Super stable, no feature bloat, professional grade performance, great support communityg. Geek factor involved, you will always look cooler than someone painting green bars on the screen using his mouse and more like a music or beat scientist who uses an arcane and esoteric language (to beginners) and codes and gets the job done in a faster manner where results matter.h. Easy on the pockets for the results it can achieve.i. Modern and slick UI with excellent UX and workflow design, supports themes. I wished Reason to be this effective all those years I was loyal using it.j. Very unique set of features that are unique to trackers and Renoise both which greatly augment your general experience of doing music production on the computer.Using Renoise is mostly a mindset thing, or a love of technology thing or a discovery thing for most people. Much like the Mac - a lot many do not go back to their earlier DAWs once they have tasted this unique style of music production values all packaged into a neat powerful industry standard tool.By any measure Renoise is the most powerful tracker in the market, so its to your benefit to at least explore and push your comfort zones to something that will make music making super intuitive and efficient to boot.Cons. No live multitrack recording. But recorders are dime a dozen really and for electronic music is in no way a deal breaker, to reminisce think about the MPC as a reference- you think you can record a rock band with all instruments at the same time like a traditional mixer with an MPC? Not what its built for. For rock music and others, this might not be the most effective use of the feature set that Renoise offers. A more traditional tape based recording app is better for those kind of things, and you still need a multi input soundcard or mixer setup - all of which you can do in the freeware Reaper (or pay if you wish) for next to nothing.Little more in detail-Samples are the foundation when it comes to trackers and Renoise in particular. Whether you draw a wave shape on the wave editor (Waveform tab) or use an existing sample.In the picture above, I have drawn a custom shape over the orange selected area using the Draw tool enabled with the button on the top right toolpanel. Your main concern with a sampler is how to get the sounds into it.- You can draw your waveform to create a sample based instrument- You can record from external sources (soundcard/microphone/guitar or bass line-in)- Import loops and samples from the Renoise Browser view.Lower toolpanel features :Undo/Redo SupportEnable/disable undo in the Waveform editor. When working with very large samples, temporarily disabling undo may be useful to save time. All undo/redo processing is saved to disk, so running out of memory should not be a problem.Cut/Copy/Paste- Cut the selection (or whole sample if nothing is selected).- Trim to selection (delete everything outside of the selection).Amplitude- Change the volume of the sample or selection (will open up a window to specify the exact amount).- Raise the volume of the sample or selection to the maximum possible value without clipping.- Insert silence into the selected range, or silence the whole sample if no range is selected.Fading- Fade the sample in linearly (can fade logarithmically via the right-click context menu or shortcuts).- Fade the sample out linearly (can fade logarithmically via the right-click context menu or shortcuts).Reverse & Swap- Reverse the sample or selection.- Center the sample or selection to the DC line. Fixes vertical DC offsets.- Invert the phase of the sample or selection.- Swap the left and right channels of the sample or selection. Only possible for stereo samples.Process Track FXApply the selected track/sample fx chain directly to the sample's waveform (applies both native and plugin effects). Note that this will not automatically extend the length of the sample for reverbs, delays etc. that last longer than the original sample.-Select between track and sample fx chains for the previous option.- Smooth the sample. A simple interpolation process which removes hiss and sharp edges from the waveform. Useful to smooth out hand-drawn samples.Loop Controls- Automatically create a smooth cross-faded loop.- Toggles whether a sample will instantly stop or finish its current loop after a Note-Off input.- When looping is enabled by selecting a loop type from the menu, start and end points are inserted into the waveform, causing playback to loop between them. The loop points can be moved by click-dragging their tabs at the top/bottom of the waveform.Off: No loop.Forward: Loop playback from start to end.Reverse: Loop playback from end to start once the end point is reached.PingPong: Loop playback from start to end to start to end etc.Play/Stop- Start/Stop playing sample from the cursor position to the end of the visible waveform, or Start/Stop playing the selection if one is present.- Select where the sample will be played back: On the Master Track to bypass the current track's effects, or on the selected track to hear the sample with the currently active effects.- The current cursor position or selection range positions are shown in the format of the Lower Ruler. To change the format, right-click on the Lower Ruler and choose from the list.Apply Track FX/Apply DSP FX Chain is like a quick freeze feature or a regular destructive FX function - whichever way you see it. BTW this is separate from features in Renoise like Track/Pattern render to sample and other such workflow enhancers. The DSP FX chain is another FX signal chain separate from the regular expected track FX. Thus every instrument or sample can have their own FX chains - in addition to the norm. In the snapshot below the next couple of tabs after the Waveform tab, and the one of interest is the Effects tab. Here you can see that the DSP Chain has a 3 chorus plugins. This is separate from the Track FX.Another feature is that you can grab an entire VST plugin and make a separate Renoise instrument from it. It works like a charm with demo versions when you can grab it whole and remove the VST plugin totally. It does not always work with the more complicated plugins like Pianoteq, which might take some more work. But in general for synths and drums the plugin grabber feature works great in Renoise. Play around with it. One way you can get to it via right-clicking the Instrument in the Instrument Panel in Renoise.In Renoise the intrument itself is logically a separate entity from the Track which is used for sequencing it. Meaning that you can audition one Renoise instrument in any of the selected Tracks with their own FX setups. You can also trigger an instrument from any Track. This decoupling is a very powerful thing. And as you can see sets itself apart architecturally, logically and in presentation as well from the bulk of other sequencers in the market. What this implies is that you can have one sample or Renoise instrument sound through as many separate Tracks as possible with their own FX setups and all - and that is without all the cabling as in Reason or using Aux tracks like in other sequencers - all handled internally. One note can be triggered dry in one Track and the same note retriggered wet in another Track. See the power already? Now couple this with FX macros and per instrument DSP chains and you can see when it comes to FX routing flexibility Renoise is weaponised out of the box.In the snapshot above, C-3 00 refers to the C note played in the 3rd octave for instrument number 00 (Renoise uses the hex base so more like 0x00 for the geeks). Both Tracks have the same note entry but they are in different tracks and with their own FX setup. I hope this simple example clarifies your viewpoints.You can read more about the inbuilt FX in Renoise online at http://tutorials.renoise.com/wiki/Audio_EffectsNext very important feature is Slicing :The slicer markers can themselves be done and undone as many times as you like - totally non-destructive like Rex files in Reason. To destructively render an instrument's slices into individual samples, right-click on the waveform and select "Slices > Destructively Render Slices" from the menu.When working on the slice zoom, you can just position and hover the mouse over the slice area and all zooming is shifted to that particular focus when you use the scroll wheel (press left Alt for panning left or right while zooming). It is these small things that really enhance the workflow by magnitudes when working in Renoise. Now the same thing can be done in the keyboard using the RIGHT/LEFT keys for moving the waveform cursor right or left across the wave and Ctrl+UP/DOWN to zoom in an out, works exactly as you would imagine and is as tactile as using the mouse - except without using a mouse. Press the Enter key to play the sample. Not Spacebar as that is for the main song.In fact pretty much each and every feature can be tweaked and nudged as well as the patterns recorded and edited all with just the keyboard. Mouse is mostly a secondary thing with Renoise. If you think that is magic - welcome to the Renoise world.The prominently laid out Record button with the most pertinent sample information.The recording window.Slice MarkersThe slicing controls are located at the top right of the interface. Slicing allows you to non-destructively split a sample into pieces by inserting markers, which can be usefully placed on individual drum hits, notes, vocal phrases etc.- Activating the Slice button will change the mouse pointer to the Slice Marker Tool. With this you can left-click on the waveform to slice it into different sections.- Automatically insert markers into the waveform at points where beats/transients are detected.- The sensitivity of the auto-slicing beat detection can be adjusted using this value box. Higher values will lead to more markers being inserted.- If enabled, a triggered slice will stop playing at start of the next slice.As you add slices to a sample, the Keyzones editor will automatically lay these out across the keyboard according to its current Drum Kit settings, allowing you to trigger each slice from a different key on the keyboard. You can also trigger a slice via the 0Sxx Effect Command, where the xx value corresponds to a slice number. Each slice you place is given a numbered tab at the top and left-click-dragging on it will move the slice around. Right-clicking on a tab will bring up a menu with the option to: select all markers, delete the current marker or delete all markers.Although you can still edit the original sample, you cannot edit the individual sample slices. However, the Loop type and all Sample Properties like volume, panning etc. can be changed per slice. A newly created slice will inherit the original sample's properties.There are many things going on in the one sampler window above. The macro section is used for performance and automation. The main window is the waveform with crossfades and loop points adjusted. The phrase bank towards the low right has pre-recorded phrases on each slot. The Program mode mean that each phrase is selected and that pattern is played and pitch shifted depending on the keyboard midi note being played. The note event data contained in the phrase slot is being played back as such and not pitch shifted from audio so that no chipmunk effect happens. I find this feature immensely useful. You can also use keymap mode to trigger each phrase depending on a key range allocated for it, more like a keyzone but for phrases instead of samples.The keyzones in the Keyzones tab is reminiscent of Native Instruments Kontakt as the zones are simply drag and drop created. The right lower pane has the sample list and the upper smaller right pane is the instrument list.As you can see, the sampler itself is very well featured with the most time tested feature set and the most used ones as well. Renoise is best for beatmaking kind of workflows and electronic music in general - for beatmakers, certainly if they can get their heads around it. Trackers are mostly a White crowd thing for all this time, and hence the Black community (not trying to be a racist or anything) has already embraced the MPC, they might not feel the immediate need to get to a tracker. But its their loss for all I know. I mean, the MPC is golden for sure. But in the software realm - Renoise does so much more than Maschine could ever. Yet, the Maschine hardware is the USP in my opinion becos of its ease of use and modern design. The software itself is very basic paint by the numbers kind of workflow. If you need to trigger some samples and make your own kit and things like that - Renoise can get all of that done and much more with much less legwork, and minimal use of the mouse. In Maschine you could be clicking the whole day right upto getting your carpal tunnel. Plus, there is nothing inherently new in the Maschine interface as such. Akai has been doing this for years and has become gold standard in that world. But then again, none of the beatmaking tools or samplers in general have the tracker feel to them or a predominantly mouse less approach. In fact that is the main reason the Akai MPC gets the job done, because there is no mouse. A dedicated mouseless interface really does help.Another thing about the recording styles as well - in the MPC, fiddling with the edit window in the LCD was not the best use of time in order to work with event data, so the primary focus was on getting to play the parts and then work on the timing and quantization as and when required. Features like 16 layers for velocity, filter or polyphonic mode to play the keys and other pitched instruments in a more traditional fashion was instrumental in getting that particular sound we have come to associate beats with. Same thing with Renoise, you can program a foundation beat in dead 3 seconds flat - that fast! But your focus is always in getting to record mode (Escape key) and PLAY your patterns in Renoise. That way, you are NOT fiddling with the mouse for certain, trying to paint your melody and harmony passively, but also you are developing timing, performance and rhythm skills as well as harmonic sense and song arrangements all in realtime but in a non-destructive manner - you can always revisit anytime. This kind of performance related recording approach is a keystone in the MPC and beatmaking world. You could paint in the piano roll all day and still not get the unique sound you get by playing the drum pattern yourself with some midi controller or an MPC like setup. Its as simple as that. You cannot mechanize everything - and that is what Reason, FLStudio and other DAWs kind of enforce you to. Nudging your way inside a piano roll is so 90’s in terms of using a machine feature. Only techno gets made this way.Finger drumming is another thing that is so strong as a skillset now - you can make entire songs this way using the beatmaker’s template - all done live. In Renoise, you can simply setup the sounds in any one instrument and use any of the MIDI controller keys to trigger samples - if that is all you are after. Or you could trigger individual phrases as well in addition to samples and make it a very complicated piece of prepared yet improvised performance. Inject a live musician or a live instrument like keys further and you should be having a banging performance.The familiar resampling option that is a mainstay in MPCs and other beatmaking tools - is of ridiculous capability in Renoise. You can resample absolutely anything. Any instrument, any sample, any track, the whole song, any pattern, part of a pattern, single data event in the pattern and so on. Just select and render to a new sample or instrument. Takes resampling to a whole new level.Drum kits cannot be any easier. You could just use one those numerous drum sounds plugins or build you own in 7 seconds flat by draggin and dropping drum kit samples, or slicing a drum loop and mapping it all in the keyboard as you go. The sound itself can be taken from any external sound like Vinyl records, or you could just bounce the drum plugin output with your pattern and resample it and recut it.You can run all the VST plugins you need in Renoise, and really play with the FX path as well. It runs on PC, MAC and Linux. Honestly, what else do you need if sample based music is all you are looking for ?Ableton’s Session View and Scenes is what the Phrase sequencer is in Renoise, an ingenious concept that is totally owned in a fantastic manner within Renoise.Have I even covered the in-track FX options as data events? Like so many things that make drill n bass and sample manipulation so easy in Renoise. Best left for other musicians and beatmakers to discover on their own, things like mutes and solos as well as reverse samples and stutter glitches are all done here with a single text based command. BTW you can also automate them. Don’t want to make this into a user manual.If you can get your head around, and in todays computer literate generation, computing and hex bases should not be a problem anymore - please get Renoise - and unleash full power to your productions.You can also try SunVox and Radium for other trackers with their own concepts and interface workflows.The sense of timing is something you need to be intuitive with in Renoise. In Renoise we have the division Ticks Per Line, Lines Per Beat and BPM. Ticks Per Line is the number of equal divisions in a Line. Lines Per Beat refers to the number of Lines required to make a logical beat- like 5 lines in a beat. Meaning, its more like a quintuplet where there are five individual time data event slots that get played in one beat. Thus for a 5/4 beat in Renoise - the number of total lines in the beat is 5*4 =20 lines for one measure. For two measures in one pattern you need 40 lines in one pattern length. The ticks are very much like the Akai MPC 12 ticks per line thing. Its the machine subdivision of how much it internally handles the timing resolution. The maximum value is 16 and I set it to 12 or 16 depending on the amount of swing I need to faithfully record. If you ever worked on the MPC, you will feel right at home with Renoise. So much of what the MPC is to hardware is Renoise to software. If a company ever decided to make a dedicated Renoise hardware, it would be the most beautifully paired combination for sure. Maschine has great hardware but the software is meh for me. With Renoise and its unique UI and featureset, a dedicated hardware will be a surething gamechanger for the music scene. However, commercially since Trackers are more of an alternative form of sequencing in the populist music production sense, and not many people into technical expertise but rather ease of use and eye candy - I see a dedicated but limited market - or with great promotion, maybe it takes of really well. The hardware can encapsulate some of the quirkyness of Renoise software and handle the beatmaking duties within the hardware itself making it cater to everyone in the end. Extremely powerful software with a unique hardware too, maybe in the future.Finally, Redux is the VST plugin version of Renoise and dedicated users of other DAWS can now load a Renoise like Phrase bank and Sequencer in their existing setup, greatly augmenting and enhancing their workflows.I believe, all the the tools have their own strong points and some of the weaker points. Just like OSes, whether you work on Windows, Mac or Linux is upto you- many of their feature sets overlap and its a personal preference or security thing or a market share thing at the end. So, end of the day, what you get done is more important, not just the how, or certainly not - only the how - and that is why the main question repeats itself again, how does one particular tool help you achieve your thing? If it does enable you to get your work done in the best possible way - you win, regardless of the tool.