into the command entry box at the bottom of the screen. If this is your first time installing Pedalboard, make sure to tell norns to sleep once the install has completed, then it should work after you boot it up again.
Also available as a direct download. Unzip it, rename the folder to just āpedalboardā, and put the whole folder onto your norns inside the /home/we/dust/code folder. As with the normal install process, if this is your first time installing Pedalboard, make sure to tell norns to sleep once the install has completed, then it should work after you boot it up again.
Lovely! Gonna test this as soon as I can tomorrow. Could I use the Norns with this Pedalboard app as a āheadphone ampā, or do I still need to amplify my guitar signal? I have found that (with other apps) the Norns needs a high input level to be audible through headphones, and I use a clean boost to reach a certain input level. Or is it purely a āpedalā, meaning it must be between your guitar and amp? I use a DIY Norns Shield, by the way.
Short answer: Pedalboard comes with built-in (optional) input gain and output gain per pedal, so you should be able to bump the volume up enough to be comfortably audible going directly from guitar -> norns Pedalboard app -> headphones.
Longer answer(s):
Honestly even without Pedalboard, though, my guitar was decently audible just using the norns built-in āLevels > Headphone Gainā parameter. But it certainly sounded much better once I added Overdrive (with +12dB input gain) and Reverb pedals to Pedalboard! Pedalboard doesnāt have an āamp simulatorā pedal, but Overdrive into Reverb does an okay job simulating an amp if thatās what youāre after.
The bigger drawback is that Pedalboard is right now stereo by default ā each effect is applied to each channel separately, so if you only have Left signal in, youāll only get Left signal out. The two exceptions to this are: Reverb (which reverberates the input signal in stereo space), and Delay in Ping-Pong mode (which will bouce your mono in back and forth between left and right outs). If you plug your instrument into the norns Left in, and then run from the norns Left out into your amp, then this all fine, but for headphones youāll probably get tired of only hearing in your left ear. Iād recommend adding Reverb at the end of your chain with mix up pretty high, and then you can turn size and decay down to reduce the reverb amount (but keep the mono->stereo benefits). It shouldnāt be too hard for me to add mono mode ā I can do that before the v1.0.0 release
Iām sure one of the norns designers or someone with more technical knowledge could speak to this better than I could, but my understanding is that norns is ideally designed to be used with line level hardware (either consumer -10dBu or pro +4dBu), and basically every guitar outputs signal far below that. However, each pedal in the Pedalboard app offers an āinput gainā control up to +12 dB, which may be very helpful if youāre plugging directly into norns and then out into your headphones. This would more or less mimic your āclean boostā stage, but (just like whatever youāre using for clean boost) itās going to boost noise as well as signal. A lot of clean boost pedals can have fancy techniques to reduce noise, but this is also kinda just the nature of the beast.
Thanks for the elaborate reply! I donāt mind a bit of noise, so Iāll figure it out tomorrow and see how bad it actually is. Really looking forward to test this.
Oh, and something like a glitch/stutter pedal would be great as well (something like the stutter part of the Meris Ottobit Jr), but thatās probably difficult to program and not the priority right now
iād strongly recommend using an analog gain stage between passive electroacoustic instruments and norns or norns-shield. you will get much lower noise floor (12b of gain ~= 2 bits of noise, &c) and probably a more satisfying frequency response. donāt need anything fancy.
(aside)
iād characterize my norns units as closer to +4dbu than -10dbv, seem to peak around 1.1v when connected to capture circuits in +4dbu stuff (but iāve not done extensive impedance analysis or anything.) call it ā0dbuā maybe. but other people have reported that it looks more like -10dbv. so iām not sure what to say to that but am generally conservative in recommending that itās best to think of it as a consumer line level device.
@21echoes lovely work on this! the abstractions are so nicely organized, i can see this being a really great resource for crazy new scripts as well.
Selfishly, the timing of this couldnāt be more perfect for me. I had a norns delivered today and one of the use cases I had in mind was as an FX send from my mixer. I hope to try this out and provide feedback ā maybe even suggest some FX modules. Cheers
Awesome, looking forward to your feedback! Happy to hear youāre going to try it as an FX send from a mixer ā I know that āpedalboardā makes people think of guitars, but honestly I mainly wrote this to use with my modular. Most of my playing these days (well, before the quarantine) is free improv sessions at a friendās place, so I keep my rig pretty small, and I wanted a way to bring a lot of effects without using up hp (effects that I wasnāt going to modulate with CV anyway). I liked the norns already for MLR or Compass or Foulplay or etc, so being able to use it for FX when I wasnāt using one of those was a perfect fit.
Going for a test drive todayā¦ and Iām wondering if Iām seeing odd or normal behavior from the Flanger unit.
Iām sending a drum machine thru and the flanger doesnāt seem to do much of anything interesting until I get the feeback up to like 97-98-99-100 and then itās a fast train to crazytown.
Chorus also seems to be pretty subtle on a dum pattern.
Yeah I had a hard time tuning the Flanger and Chorus pedals . They were noticeable in headphones, but trying it out on speakers some more I think they could do with more exaggeration. Have you tried keeping Flangerās feedback low, but really cranking the rate and depth? Also remember the mix dial on every pedalās second page If you could let me know what settings to you sound like a noticeable-but-not-too-crazy flanger and chorus with your setup, I can try to put the midpoint baseline closer to that
So yeah - sounds like a bit more going on with headphones, but still subtle.
Playing with just Flanger Rate and Depth, it seems kinda the same to me below 50 or so, with more interesting stuff happening above like 75, then bringing up the feedback to 90+ things sound more flanger-y
(grasping at straws since iām not sure how this works) should those controls be exp instead of lin? (or vice versa)
Update Edit - A curiosity - Assigning a parameter to midi cc and using an external controller (16n) does not update the Pedalboard UI (on screen āknobā positions). Soā¦ would Board:_add_param_actions() action need to set screen_dirty to fix that?
Yeah, I havenāt done MIDI mapping before so I hadnāt wrestled with how to make sure the screen stays in sync. It would in fact be as simple as having this line https://github.com/21echoes/pedalboard/blob/master/lib/ui/pedals/pedal.lua#L127 set screen_dirty, but the wrinkle is that pedal doesnāt currently have any way of doing that directly (other than returning true from enc or key). Could do like we do with board and pass in mark_screen_dirty as a callback function. Do you have a link to instructions for MIDI mapping, btw? Iād love to set that up on my end so I could test it out.
Flanger and Chorus improvements (same as version v0.9.1)
Mono mode (accessible in the parameters menu). While enabled, the left input is doubled into the right input and the right input is ignored
You can add a pedal or swap to a pedal and have the pedal bypassed by default if you hold K2 and then do the normal K3-to-confirm. This allows you to set up some more / different pedals and tweak them before they start affecting your sound so you can more easily time precisely when you turn the effect on during a performance
Added a Sample Rate control to the Bitcrusher
Sustain pedal shouldnāt have as intense āpopsā during transients
Small dial tweaks (better positioning, both encoders control the dial if thereās only one dial in the section)
Bug fix for MIDI mapped parameters updating the screen
Delay pedal now knows about tempo and rhythm. Rather than a vague ātimeā dial, thereās a BPM dial and a āBeat divisionā dial (quarter note, triplet 8th note, whole note, etc.). You can also tap tempo to get your BPM by holding K2 and tapping K3
Delay pedal now has many different quality settings: Digital, Analog, Tape, and Lo-Fi. Analog is a hint of softclipping and filtering, Tape is more aggressive softclipping and filtering plus a bit of noise, and Lo-Fi is like Tape with some bit-reduction and a hint of a high-pass filter.
UI is slightly improved (bypass is now a label instead of some vague 0/1 dial). Under the hood this was honestly more about the significant rewrite of the Pedal UI classes. The rewrite pulls almost all behavior into the superclass so that new pedals are basically just a list of parameters, and the UI and interaction bindings and engine bindings are all handled for you. Hereās an example
Coming soon: multi-tap delay, varispeed delay, reverb shimmer, and tap-tempo for tremolo.
Hoping to reach 1.0 and add it to the Library by the end of the week, would love any more feedback before then
. They were noticeable in headphones, but trying it out on speakers some more I think they could do with more exaggeration. Have you tried keeping Flangerās feedback low, but really cranking the rate and depth? Also remember the mix dial on every pedalās second page 