Instrument Ghosting

note: the following only applies to Renoise 1.5.1 and above

In this little example, we shall demonstrate how “ghost instrument” works.

This is a feature which many second generation trackers (FT2, IT2) had.

Basically, it lets you avoid envelope retrigging at each new note.

1] pick an instrument which has at least an envelope (volume envelope, for example) set and turned on. It’s better if you choose an instrument with a long envelope (128 to 200 ticks) for this example.

2] put a note for this instrument on a column
C-4 01
3] put another note on the same column
C-4 01
E-4 01

4] put the cursor over the instrument number of the second note
C-4 01
E-4 01
5] press del (the instrument number will disappear)
C-4 01
E-4
6] play the pattern: you will notice that the second note will start without restarting the envelope


(Note :If you use groove tricks by changing song-speeds / songbpm, this will influence envelop processing as it is based upon passes per x ticks. This may cause the envelope to interrupt it’s process on unexpectable spots or restart at unexpectable spots. So the ghosting notes will not work efficiently when using different tempo changes within the same tick scope of the envelope size.)

With this feature, we can achieve very interesting results, expecially when using filter+cutoff envelopes, because we can let that envelopes “flow” through a whole bassline, without ever retrigging them from beginning: just remove all the instrument numbers from the notes of the bassline, except the first, and you are done!

silly example (look at the pattern during first play, then look at the envelope)
more clever example (look how a filtered sweep can be easily built without using any track DSP nor any complex automation)
(*)



(*) I will put a better example here as soon as I will be able to release my song for Buenzli Demo Party.