My Favorite Norns Scripts Episode 3: Otis

[@TheNimasan]

thx for your great series. couple of days ago i got a mnorns. do you need the grid absolutely to use ottis. does a launchpad do the job as well? i will get a grid sometime, but if i wanna learn ottis, is that possible without the grid?

[@peterbarkmusic]

You don't need a grid for Otis, but it is very useful. You can achieve pretty much the same control using custom midi mapping. I haven't used the launchpad before, but I know it can be used in place of a grid.

[@blitbleep]

Wonderful video and great performance! Otis is one of my fav too but i havent explored the grid yet. I wish wrms would have a grid interface as well

[@peterbarkmusic]

thank you so much! I've had a lot of success midi mapping wrms, not sure if you watched my last video, but I go through that pretty extensively.

[@blitbleep]

@@peterbarkmusic N, i haven't and it's on my to watch list but I remember you posting about using touchosc or something alike to midi control wrms, which was pretty cool. I hadn't got much success with a midi fighter though.

[@peterbarkmusic]

@@blitbleep TouchOSC is really great, but midi fighter should do the trick if you have the knobs version. You might not get a ton out of the one that's just buttons though.

[@BrotherMynor]

Another awesome video man! Otis has always alluded me a bit and this was super helpful. I'm curious since you have a cocoquantus as well, what is the difference in use case between them? When would you pick one over the other?

[@peterbarkmusic]

Thank you! That's a great question... I think the easiest way I can explain it is that coco feels more like an instrument than an effect. Coco is way harder to wrangle than otis is. In a way that's really nice, and can lead to some interesting results. I would never try to do exact jumps in speed or pitch on coco the way you can with otis. Even pitching something down an octave is a bit of a struggle since the tune controls are fairly delicate. Coco also has a pretty distinct sound which you can get close to on otis, but it's not exactly the same. If I'm doing a complicated patch on plumbutter the integration with coco is so seamless that I'll choose that, or if I just want to add some color to an external audio source. For any kind of precise stuff though it's otis all the way.