I'm Back on the Norns Train
I should write something longer to help organize my feelings about the Norns because it feels messy, but I don't have time for that now. Norns rocks Norns forever and also I feel like I'm forever like 3 days away from abandoning ship and buying a Ditto X4 to replace the Norns.
Long story short, it turns out that when you're playing with another person, it gets harder to work around the un-sanded edges of some community-made projects. In a solo and improvised set, I can say to myself "oops that behavior was weird but no big deal I'll fold it in and recover." In a duo set that's even just a little bit not completely improvised, this doesn't work so well. If I suddenly have the software lock up, or a filter starts acting strangely, the context and structure of what "recovery" looks like is lot more diffuse and usually, I don't know, inaccessible.
I've been fighting a couple scripts on the Norns lately and trying to get them to do exactly what I want, but of course, someone else wrote them, so that was never going to happen.
A hardware looper will also never do exactly what I want, but I have no access to its source code, so it's way easier to just leave well enough alone and build a practice around its peculiarities. There's Github links everywhere in the Norns zone, so why don't I just take a little time to edit a script to do what I want?
That's why I nearly bailed on the Norns recently. A time dedication crash out. I don't have time to edit code, I said to myself. I want to make music.
But, big exciting climax, it turned out to be way easier to modify my favorite script than I expected and now I'm mostly cooking.
My favorite script is Otis. I love it deeply and always come back to it because it's simple and deep in just the right way. BUT: the loop recording mechanism requires you to set start and end points of loop length numerically. There is no pedal-like feature where a button starts recording, and then that same button stops recording and sets the loop length. Weird! Many Norns looper scripts don't have this, actually, and I couldn't tell you why, but it was never really a problem for me until I started improvising with someone else and wanted to do semi-timed loops.
Here's the Github link to my fork of the Otis code. Maybe you'll find it useful. Otis with guitar pedal mode