would you recommend it to someone working on tape loops/experimental ambient music?
Absolutely. Experimental/ambient/drone/noise might be the ideal use case for the Organelle, really. Some interesting, exploratory, highly usable patches to browse through from Kyle Werle, shreeswifty (exclusive stuff on his patreon too) and others. If you search around the forums and elsewhere, shreeswifty has emulated all kinds of devices you might love to have access to - Morphagene, Count to Five, Infinite Jets. Or you can just spend time entirely within ORAC building things if you choose, which is singlehandedly worth the price of admission. If you have an idea for 3 different non-linear real-time samplers clocked together and operating in parallel while processing your guitar, for example, you can map out the flow on a sketchpad and have a fully working prototype via ORAC in under an hour, which is very satisfying. Instant Fennesz?
And how does the Norns compare?
Impossible to say at this very early stage in its life. I have one, but have only dipped my toes into it. There’s no large user library to speak of yet, 2.0 firmware is just around the corner, so is Crow. Owning a Norns is all about the long game. The community will probably still be active in a decade or two, going through occasional slumps and second, third, fourth winds, just like Grids and the rest of the Monome ecosystem gets progressively better and more robust as time goes on. The building blocks are all (almost) there, and are very promising. It’s also designed in a clever way so that it’s relatively easy for users to tweak how their particular control and UI works (through lua which is pretty accessible), and that’s enough to customize things to your liking without needing to get into the supercollider-based sound engine / DSP stuff if you don’t have the time or inclination.
Yay norns: tiny and portable with rechargeable battery; great built-in tape-style recording and mixing turns it into a viable field recorder and audio sketchpad; plays well with grids, knobby controllers, and eurorack (soon); a handful of killer apps like MLR with much more to come down the pipeline; native wi-fi for wireless transfer and patch building; line coding through lua and supercollider just fits some people’s brains and ways of building more than visual patching stuff like puredata (I could spend a full day trying to wrap my head around what’s going on in someone’s PD patch, when the same thing in commented code would probably take me 15 minutes to grasp and tweak to my liking); more processor power and all-around more technical capability than the Organelle (if you’re an ORAC user, you will probably hit up against the CPU limits at some point sooner or later and will have to learn what the ceilings of the device running multiple patches at once are).
Yay organelle: already a vast user library you can spend years happily exploring; new first-party C&G patches fairly regularly, and they seem to be getting better in quality; built-in keyboard makes it a complete hands-on instrument without bringing in a controller; ORAC is the rug that makes the whole room come together, and lets you build systems without having any PD knowledge; ORAC 2.0 in the pipeline for more modularity goodness; it has a playful and accessible look and feel, which makes it seem something like an open-ended and evolving OP-1; visual patching will be easier and more understandable for some than line coding; no wi-fi out of the box, but an official wi-fi nub is a cheap addition; no portable power out of the box, but easy enough to get it working with a battery pack of your choice.
