Tidbit uses Norns, Crow and JF (or W/) OR a midi device (thanks @xmacex!) to create granular notes- addressing JF in a very rapid way as to use the absolute most of its six voices to create everything from rich sound beds to short scrapy percussive sounds. It applies the long history of granular synthesis to the six voices of Just Friends, starting from Democritus’ atom theory all the way to Curtis Roads’ writings on Microsound and beyond.
You curate four sets of five notes, or- randomise them in the PARAMS menu. Now, you can modulate the sound parameters on JF, skipping through different note-sets with E3 and divisions with E2. Don’t forget to play with the different modes on JF (transient, sustain and cycle) for even more timbral variation.
For W/2 enthusiasts, it includes Pluckylogger, clamped random parameters for w2/synth by @mlogger. You can even use W/2synth in tandem with JF.
See another short demo from an earlier version a while back here.
Requirements
Norns and one of the below
Optional: Crow, W/, Just Friends or a MIDI device!
Todo
randomisation of wsyn params per grain would be cool
a more beautiful visualisation (seems broken rn?)
amplitudes should start at 1 (or at least half of them per chord)
check the range of the notes (seemed to be able to go lower first when it was still numerical)
dynamic amount of notes/note sets?
make a “spread” param that can detune every note by a random amount
set Crow inputs to determine noteset/division!
make a “slow ambient mode”, in which I maybe read out ‘cycle’ state, or can trigger with K3 or something. Slow moving partial-mode ish. Have to think this through.
this sounds wonderful. I am going to try it out now, thank you!
do you think it would be possible to have norns live audio input (maybe just left channel) somehow resynthesized by JF? I guess that would require some spectral analysis and I’m not sure if norns is really up to that task. I’m not entirely sure what JF can do either… but I’m very curious about this sort of thing.
Thank you all for the wonderful comments- it has been great to see on Instagram what some of you have been using this for! Great to be able to give back to this wonderful community. Keep 'em coming!
Not sure! Also have been wondering about the analysis capabilities of Norns- It’s probably possible with Supercollider, but I also found this that makes me think it’s probably a bit hard. Also, there is of course Glaciers by @dwtong which does FFT stuff it seems from a quick glance at the code. Would indeed be cool to have JF as 6 resynthesized voices from an incoming sample. I don’t think I have the SC knowledge to do this, though
Yes certainly you could have supercollider emit spectral density peaks or etc,.pass to norns Lua, emit i2c. The linked post by me outlines the limitations that one would encounter trying to efficiently handle raw FFT output in Lua at a useful resolution / hop size., which I don’t particularly recommend but also possible if one is willing to address the texhnical problems.
In any case… There are many methods of analysis resynthesis. If target is six oscillators,.makes sense to me to look for an SC implementation of PARSHL-like sinusoidal peak tracking.
In other words, when doing resynthesis with small oscillator count, it’s beneficial to extrapolate peak trajectories as opposed to just tracking raw peaks per frame. I would not be surprised if someone already implemented this.
I tried this with w/ synth today and it’s really interesting. If you hook up all the w/ synth parameters to a midi controller it’s a lot easier to zone into a sound you like. Also I have note selection / randomisation and clock divisions on separate sliders so it’s easy to improvise with. It really opens up w/ to a wider range of sounds instead of menu diving.
So cool! Will try- maybe we need different settings than the Pluckylogger ones for using wsyn like this? Less percussive? Seems AR envelopes are important.
@mlogger means the FM synth that runs on the Whimsical Raps W/ module- not just “with another synth”. It currently only works via i2c, and I would not know how to make it to work for other gear except maybe an internal synth on the Norns. Tried that and could not make it sound good yet…
if you want less percussive just set both LPG time and LPG symmetry to -5.0v
w/ fm synth is really good for doing drones and organs.if you set all notes to C-2, Division 1/1 voice chance 54 and run the sequence.
Drone 1
AR mode on
Curve -3.35
Ramp 3.27
FM index 0.79
FM env -1.14
FM ratio num 10
FM ratio denom 1
LPG time -5v
LPG symmetry -5v
then adjust the notes slowly so they are still in the -2 range and slowly turn Ramp.
sunn 0))) style doom drone
AR mode off
Velocity 0.75
Curve -4.06
Ramp 0.28
FM index 0.12
FM env -0.75
FM ratio num 5
FM ratio denom 4
LPG time -5v
LPG symmetry -5v
this is with div 1.0 / voice chance 54 / note set 1 - all notes to C-2.
Amp 1 - 0.36
Amp 2 - 0.28
Amp 3 - 0.1
Amp 4 - 0.36
Amp 5 - 0.74
With all the w/ fm synth parameters and note selection hooked upto a midi controller it is very easy to find the sound you want and fine tune. All I did was move sliders, found a sound, then looked in the w/ synth menu and read what the actual numbers were and saved it as a pset.
this is the sunn o))) w/ fm synth preset from the home/we/dust/data/tidbit folder (it’s pset 83 on my norns) so just change that number to suit your norns pset folder tidbit-83.pset (1.6 KB)
this is the w/ fm synth sunn o))) style drone
here’s using the script - not as intended, but at a much slower speed with the pset sequencer mod.
Keep 'em coming!