Norns

The norns is a raspberry pi-based sound computer from monome. I currently have the norns shield as part of my music setup.

Developing norns supercollider engines locally

Sometimes I want to work on a norns supercollider engine locally. This gist helped and also this community wiki post.

  1. Pull the norns repository
  2. Make symbolic links from norns sc folders -> SuperCollider Extensions folder:
    • ln -s ~/Developer/monome/norns/sc/core ~/Library/Application\ Support/SuperCollider/Extensions/monome-norns-core
    • ln -s ~/Developer/monome/norns/sc/engines ~/Library/Application\ Support/SuperCollider/Extensions/monome-norns-engines
    • ln -s ~/Developer/monome/norns/sc/ugens ~/Library/Application\ Support/SuperCollider/Extensions/monome-norns-ugens
  3. Make symlinks to Norns community repos e.g. ln -s ~/Developer/monome/we/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/SuperCollider/Extensions/monome-we

  4. Make symlinks for custom engine development e.g. ln -s ~/Developer/MyNornsMachines/ ~/Library/Application\ Support/SuperCollider/Extensions/MyNornsMachines

I can send commands to the engine using something like

n = NetAddr.localAddr;
n.sendMsg('/engine/load/name', 'Thunk');
n.sendMsg('/command/load_sample', 1, 'sample.wav');
n.sendMsg('/command/note_on', 1, 1, 1.0, 1.0);

Using Digitakt as a soundcard

You can use the connecto script to connect Audio over USB to the Digitakt. This works great, but seems to use a little more CPU. So to make the change more “permanent” (you can always undo these changes and reboot of course) I found this suggestion on lines:

Change line in /etc/systemd/system/norns-jack.service from

ExecStart=/usr/bin/jackd -R -P 95 -d alsa -d hw:sndrpimonome -r 48000 -n 3 -p 128 -S -s

to

ExecStart=/usr/bin/jackd -R -P 95 -d alsa -d hw:1 -r 48000 -n 3 -p 128 -S -s

and then reboot (or sudo systemctl restart norns.target). The digitakt needs to be connected and powered on when the norns boots for this to work.

My norns projects

Links to this note