#41

I’m just gonna go ahead and be greedy and suggest another thing here. With this new workflow with snapshots, it’s very easy to create entire structures of a song here. With four snapshots, I can only get so far. With plenty more snap shots, I’d get further :slight_smile: building progression with this system is amazing.

Should ever inspiration strike, more snapshots would be something I’d use for building entire songs with this sequencer alone.

#42

Man, this app and Reels. That’s an entire album right there.

1 Like
#43

I’d have to move the snapshots column to a row to make room for more snapshots, which would mean sacrificing a bit of note range, but that’s probably fine. I’m also planning on adding a “snapshot pattern record” feature.

Could maybe do something like this on the bottom row:

1-12: snapshots
13: clear/overwrite snapshot
15: snapshot pattern record
16: toggle options page

sound good?

I’ve thought about adding a simple recorder/looper for my own improvisation setup, though I’m not sure where it would fit in the UI. Also the software developer in me worries that might be trying to make the app do many things at once. Could be fun though :slight_smile:

3 Likes
#44

Yes, please! Awesome idea!

2 Likes
#45

Sounds fantastic :pray:

And I agree on witholding the looper idea. Focus is king and this sequencer is the essence of that. The musician adds complexity, the application should not.

1 Like
#46

Great script.
Been enjoying this a lot. The snapshots add a lot to the functionality.

Just been jamming with Norns running animator sending midi to the blofeld and synced the novation circuit for drums, bass etc.

The hard bit is not letting the mix get too muddy by keeping the clock divisors more right than left.

Which is difficult because happy accidents happen with the speeds to the left too :smiley: haha

I guess skill, familiarity and careful note choices play a large part in keeping it tight.

Amazed though. It’s probably one of the most generative things I’ve experienced outside of modular.

2 Likes
#47

wow thanks! Would love to hear some of those jams if you ever wanna share.

Yeah, I find that with faster clock divisions I can usually come up with interesting ideas if I use fewer sequencers (like 3-5). Once you have all 8 sequencers running at fast speeds it can start to sound like random 16th note clusters pretty quick (which can also be fun in the right context!).

I wanted it to feel playful (was initially going to call it “doodles”, but opted for a more “serious” sounding name) and easy to randomly press things to come up with happy accidents, but also enable more fine control if you wish.

2 Likes
#48

Yeah will happily post something here when I record something. :slight_smile: I found a nice pattern and recorded it into novation circuit sequencer then routed the midi to waldorf blofeld.

Thanks for the advice I will try going a bit slower with the number of sequencers.

I found having an empty snapshot helped to stop and reset an animator sequence by switching between snapshots to just play the first few notes to add space before starting the sequence proper. Re-animator ? hehe

I don’t think there’s a way to use two midi IO to different hardware at the same time is there ?

1 Like
#49

Here’s a brief little live jam I made on Animator alone. Love this script @crim

4 Likes
#50

I’m such a dumbass…I’ve been trying to “troubleshoot” Animator not creating audio for a week untill I re-combed over this thread. Now that I actually press a button within the sequence it works! :slight_smile:

@crim I’m the first to admit that I’m not the sharpest pencil in the box, but maybe there’s a way to make this more explicit in the docs so that future dolts like myself catch on more quickly :slight_smile:

Of course also, awesome script. Can’t wait to use it!

1 Like
#51

@Glitcher Not that I’m aware of without a midi interface in between to do the routing. Animator does have configurable midi channels per sequence though, in case you want to experiment with that.

@circuitghost sounds great! Kinda reminds me of Steve Reich at times.

@gnome666 ahh sorry for the trouble. I do say “Press any pad on your new sequencer to activate that note” on the github readme, but there’s probably a better way to describe this. I’ll see if I can give the docs a little more love. bit of a challenge to describe the quirky interface I guess.

2 Likes
#52

Oh, sir, you flatter. Thank you for that kind remark.

#53

Thought I’d share a short snippet using Animator. Real quick sequence I set up with Animator sending CV out of crow for v/oct controlling 2 Serge oscillators (dual 555 VCO). Animator is being clocked externally by one half of a DUSG set to self cycle.

Crappy iphone sound. But…I was very impressed by how well in sync everything stayed with this signal path, even when I cranked up the clock rate (near the end of the video).

The snapshot saving and recall work great too imho.

:metal: :metal: :metal: :metal: :metal:

3 Likes
#54

Very nice. Reminds me of vintage Jarre, in all the good ways.

#55

Pushed some big changes to Animator just now. Latest norns update is required. It will probably break your presets if you have any, because of some changes to the parameters.

  • Updated to use global clock which includes ableton link support
  • Moved snapshots to bottom row of grid and increased snapshot number to 8 (per request from @circuitghost)
  • added “snapshot pattern record” feature. There are now 4 patterns available to the right of the snapshots. To record a pattern, press one of these pads. Recording will start as soon as you select a snapshot, and end when you press the pattern pad again. In the future I’m planning on adding the ability to sequence snapshots via a clock from the second crow input (thanks for the suggestion @cosmicsoundexplorer!)
  • the clear pad is now an “alt” pad, to the left of the page toggle pad (see github for grid diagram). Use it to overwrite a snapshot or snapshot pattern.
  • cleaned up params with new param “groups” feature

One of these days maybe I’ll record a snazzy video to demonstrate this stuff. But not today. Today it is hot and I am lazy.

A couple known issues:

  1. If you turn on LFO’s while playing back a snapshot pattern, it can sometimes break things. I’ve had a hard time tracking down why, and I’m not sure if you really need to do this anyway, so I’m leaving it for now.

  2. If you update the global tempo, snapshot pattern speed will not update with it. For now you would have to re-record your patterns if you change tempo.

9 Likes
#56

Fantastic @crim I’m getting straight to work writing a piece on this today.

You got a patreon or something? I don’t wanna keep asking for stuff and not be able to give something in return.

3 Likes
#57

looks amazing. been using it all weekend. can’t wait to dig into the next iteration.

1 Like
#58

It’s an amazingly musical sequencer. Almost too easy to make stuff sound good with this. Feels like I’m cheating :slight_smile:

3 Likes
#59

Thank you, I appreciate the sentiment but payment is really not necessary. I enjoy working on this stuff, and use it myself. Also I wouldn’t be able to do it without all the hard work people put into the norns backend, in addition to all the documentation/tutorials, and other script authors whose code I pore over and learn from.

That’s all to say I view everything as a big collaboration between everyone :slight_smile:

When I first built animator, I wasn’t sure if the idea would work well, and snapshots were kind of an afterthought. I wanted to see if people would use it and how they liked to use it before I added many more features, so I appreciate the feedback.

3 Likes
#60

Been playing with this for an hour now. A fantastic upgrade. Was planning on posting a track with it, but I got lost in just jamming and improvising, nothing came out of it worth listening to just yet :slight_smile:

But the additions work really well, and the pattern recording thing adds another dimension to the snapshot system. This is a killer application for sure @crim

2 Likes