norns-sandbox

This repo contains software for norns written by bit graves for use in live performance and studio recording.

Prerequisites

• You need a norns. (our norns was last updated to: 201202)
• You need filesystem access to your norns, one way or another
• Almost everything here acts as a signal processor rather than a generator, so you need some external audio running into the norns for this to be interesting
• You probably want some kind of midi controller (see below)

Installation

• Clone this repo anywhere under dust/code on your norns. In our case, the final path is /home/we/dust/code/bitgraves.
• The Lighthouse engine requires you to install the Vowel quark anywhere under dust/code.
• Restart the audio engine on the norns.

MIDI Input

All of the norns engines here support a large handful of params. At the time of writing, we use an Akai MPD218 midi controller to change these. If you want to use a different controller, you'll need to adjust some constants in the lua scripts. Here is an example of the mapping from Akai constants to params:

norns-sandbox/baaka/baaka.lua

Lines 34 to 41 in 31b0b64

	MPD218 = BGMidi.newInputMappingMPD218({
	[3] = 'bend',
	[9] = 'oscFreq',
	[12] = 'mix',
	[13] = 'noiseFreq',
	[14] = 'monitor',
	[15] = 'amp',
	})

MIDI Output

Some engines can optionally send MIDI control to an external synthesizer via an interface (we use iConnectivity Mio). However, at the moment, this requires compiling a patch to matron. Please get in touch if you want to learn how to set this up. These engines should still run and play sound intrinsically without this; they just won't include the external synth part.

For MIDI Output, the cc mappings live in common/bgmidi.lua.