M18s (0.4 update, ux improvements + output modes)

[jlmitch5]

crow is a great platform to get started coding with. I will say the advance1/advance2 in this script are somewhat complex and hard to reason about. Partially due to all the modes and different things that can happen (though I could probably make more elegant for sure).

That being said, the stuff at the bottom of this script should be really easy to interface with, and I tried to write a lot of documentation information of how to above so people could jump in and start using them, even if you don’t have coding experience. And of course, if any questions arise about this script, feel free to reach out to me in this thread and I’ll do my best to answer.

If you are looking for a good place to start, the crow studies have a tutorial based flow which walks you through the code highly recommended. @Galapagoose has also done a few really cool live stream walk-throughs of some crow script ideas the past few weeks that would be cool to check out, you can find out more on this thread. My a weekend scripts are also pretty simple if you want to check them out, tonight.lua especially.

[jlmitch5]

did a lot with m18s for my lines community set, figured I’d share some of the details here.

The first 9 minutes use a modified version of the script (gist here), that maps input 2 to a 8-position selector (which I control manually with a 0-5v offset knob from my quadratt). I did this so that I could change the sequence as time went on.

11-14 minutes in, the tape is playing back some early experiments as I was writing m18s, overdubbed and pitched down using ableton’s “beats” warping algorithm to turn it into some less “on the grid” and more “texture-y”

EDIT: also new version of m18s.lua (just a bugfix and some repo housekeeping)

[electret]

Made a fork of the script to be usable with JF synth mode

Code here: https://gist.github.com/lctrt/738c35cfd6970402e4556157f10428a6

[Rollingpeople]

sounds awesome! i see a Mangrove, what other oscillator?

[jlmitch5]

@electret this is awesome! Gonna have to pull this down and try it out.

@Rollingpeople thanks! It’s plaits in formant mode. They both go into 3 sisters all input.

[scotttburton]

I’ve been trying, but for some reason whenever I try and run or upload this script to crow in druid, druid just freezes and I can’t get it to work. This and the Just Friends forked script from this thread don’t work for me. I have the latest crow firmware and the latest version of Python, and still can’t get it to work. All the other scripts work fine, and I can still reset everything after quitting the Terminal. Any ideas?

[jlmitch5]

Hmm. Thanks for the report. This script is super close to the max script length…maybe it’s just not able to write it but it’s failing silently for some reason. Can you try ^^c in Druid to clear it out, and then running the script.

[scotttburton]

Sure thing! I’ll try later tonight and report back.

[jlmitch5]

cool sounds good! Vaguely remember some stuff like that when I was developing it

[scotttburton]

Now I cleared the script on crow and when I run the m18s.lua I get:
[string “eval”]:1: syntax error near ‘m18s’

So it’s definitely different because before it was freezing up druid.

[jlmitch5]

this happened to me once where the name of the file somehow got put on the top line…can you check that? if so, could you delete it and try again?

[jlmitch5]

i did just successfully run what’s on the latest master branch of the repo and it works for me btw

[jlmitch5]

It was something like that ^

[scotttburton]

Thanks so much for the help. Just did a reboot of druid, double checked that everything in my bowery folder looked right, and this time it actually ran successfully, so I think it’s all good! Not sure what was freezing druid before but I’ll let you know if it happens again.

[jlmitch5]

okay yes, fwiw, i have experienced some random druid failures in the course of development similar to what you describe…things like it stalling out, it needing a reboot/unplug of the crow usb cable sometimes. I haven’t filed any issues in the druid repo yet, because I haven’t been able to get a consistent reproduce where I feel like an issue would be useful. Maybe one of us will figure out what is causing it to fail one of these days and we can get that fixed to prevent it from happening.

Sorry it was some trouble getting up, but I’m glad you’ve got it up and running now! Please share what you end up making with it!

[jlmitch5]

so after using this for a bit…the current interface (or lack there of) is frustrating…I love the sounds that come out of it but it is a pain to get to the good stuff. Not to mention reports of this causing other people’s crows to be unresponsive (I’m assuming due to script length).

My plan is to port to norns (which will both output sound, engine TBD and send cv/gate signals to crow). You’ll be able to peform with the sequencer with grid integration (the non-grid interface method will be randomize and tweak, similar to the way you’d use it with crow, but much easier). I’ll keep a standalone version in the repo (with some optimizations to make the code a little more elegant and shorter I’ve been planning).

Consider this page “under construction”

[jlmitch5]

I’m super excited to share norns m18s! here’s a video of me playing it:

@midcenturymodular

I’ve updated the repo with the new version, as well as updated the docs on the top post above to explain a bit more about how it works. It’ll be available via maiden as soon as the commit is merged to put it in there!

I’d love any feedback y’all have. And to be clear, I’m planning more than just this “RESET” program, but I think enough is there to have some fun with it in case anyone is curious and wants to try it out!

[capleniz]

I finally gave this a try. Thank you for sharing your work, I think it’s interesting to experience how other progress through their creations. I enjoyed the crow standalone version before, even if it wasn’t the most fluid sequence creating workflow, it was fun.
Can’t wait to be able to edit all the step parameters throught norns. It’s also interesting to imagine how to incorporate the grid for further control and visualization, as others mentioned.

[jlmitch5]

Awesome thanks for the feedback!

Got some great ux feedback from @papernoise which I’ll be incorporating in the next release, which I hope to have up in a few days.

I’ve been tossing around different grid interfaces in my head and I think I’ve nailed down a direction. Because each voice can be a maximum of 64 stages, I don’t think it’s a good idea to max out a 128 with just that. It wouldn’t really give you a lot of control…I think I will dedicate 64 steps (4 rows) for step edit (with ability to control voice one two or both simultaneously…which will take up a few keys in the row above). One or two rows will be snapshot saving where you can recall different sequence states (notes, start/end, modes etc). That leaves an extra 1 or 2 rows for things like note/octave setting, etc.

[SPIKE]

this looks so cool!
will you by chance adding MIDI?