Ticks

Like said somewhere else on this site about what the base is of Renoise: a tracker is tickbased while most other music applications are time-based. Renoise belong to the same group of trackers being tickbased. Each row in a pattern is devided into ticks and the amount of ticks is determined by the speed. You don’t see this within Renoise, but the option is certainly there.

A graphical representation of this idea is displayed below. The given speed-factor is the default value:6

So in the above image, the tickbox shown on the right side, counts for every line / row in the pattern. The lower you set the speed-rate , the faster the song will play, the higher you set it, the slower, the song plays. The idea behind this ticksystem is to give you the benefit of triggering an effect with notes or samples on a moment that falls between two line jumps. The higher your speed-factor, the more moments you have on a line to trigger an effect upon that note or sample that the note is being playing. You can for instance make a note play later than the moment the line is triggered to play by Renoise (this is done with the delay effect dx in panningcolum or 0dxx in effectcolumn). Or you can make a sample being replayed from start every xth tick, which is done with the retrig effect.