To my knowledge, there really isn’t that much in the way of videos for coding… but there are certainly a few around. Just kinda scattered across a handful of threads. I’ll let you know if I’m able to dig them up. The official documentation is also concise and seems to do the trick for most. Then there are the officials Norns Studies. Failing that; the community is normally very helpful!
I’m hoping to get most of my use out of it without coding at all and just using some of the community scripts.
I’d like to see more video walkthroughs of some of the scripts in operation.
I do like the lines forum. It kinda seems like the site is way more “poetic” than informative tho lol
You don’t need to understand or write a single piece of code to make full use of norns and its satellite gear. Many scripts are mature, useful and flexible.
It’s like a video game console but you plug in musical applications instead of games. Fire up a script, and the norns becomes the instrument that the script tells it to be.
I reviewed it some time ago and made a few tracks on the platform. There’s a lot to love about it, but one should approach it from a pragmatical point of view, and look at what it actually does beyond the blinking lights and clean aesthethics. And it does a lot, it’s not just minimalism trying real hard to be useful as well, it is truly useful and powerful. But it’s not great at everything nor is it for everyone.
So you should ask yourself, why you really want to use norns and perhaps then grid and arc, and then look at it from a purely functional view and consider the lovely world it inhabits as a fantastic bonus, not the primary reason to go there.
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Yea I think it’s gonna be a long journey with it and I’ll learn a good bit from it.
I know it’s premature but I’m already considering buying a second one because I think I read you can only use one script at a time right?
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Yep, and that is one of its cons, not so much in the way that you can expect it to run multiple scripts at once, but more that you realise how extremely awesome it could be if you could. Game changer awesome.
However, the platform Tape module is great for recording, and I usually approached it by simply recording stuff into it from one script - say a session for mlr or whatnot - and then throw that into another context, such as Cranes or maybe Reels. That works, but it’s a different workflow and one you need to be very aware of.
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I received my Norns Shield earlier this week and I’ve been diving in to Orcλ. I will just say that it is a hoot!
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Cool yeah so you can import audio from the tape into another script.
I was honestly planning on just sampling it back into the octatrack and then just running it back into Norns to use a new script.
Resampling is a big part of my workflow already. If the tape thing works I would probably like to keep a lot of the workflow right there within Norns.
But can definitely see myself buying another one to make the processing a lil easier. Thanks for the insight though it’s been helpful.
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Quite an impressive norns update from monome this Friday. If one were to get norns now just as a sampler and audio manipulator, it’s worth the price tag alone. The stuff this box can do now with recorded audio is quite impressive.
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any clips of this in action?
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Not yet. Seems brand new, tho I’m seeing updates cooking on cheat codes and otis, to mention a few.
thanks for the heads up, been looking more and more interesting
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Got me a Shield and a 128 Grid a month or two ago and I’ve been having a blast with it. Just found an OG Norns so I’ll be posting the Shield for sale or trade in Canada in the Marketplace in the next day or so if anyone wants to dive in.
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any chance you’re in the Toronto area?
A few hours west.
Apparently, there’s a 3.0 version in the works as well, but no plan on when it’s out and as far as I know, no official beta. Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a 2021 thing.
But I would imagine that seeing how clever softcut is as a sampler engine and how well it’s integrated within norns, and yet missing a few glaringly obvious things, the 3.0 version might be the one where norns is mature enough that its environment won’t matter anymore. It’ll just be great as is, for anyone who’s into sampling and audio recording.
It’s quite accessible as is, I wouldn’t recommend anyone to shy away from it because of its somewhat esoteric approach, it’s really easy to use. But there’s some coherence missing that you wouldn’t find in a more commercial product, and yet it’s a tool very suitable for many contexts where music making comes first and the idea around it, second.
A small addition to the above - maybe nothing’s missing per se and anything’s possible. But there has to be a reason that resides at least partly within the architecture, that stuff like sync, automated recording, slicing, stereo sampling, sequencing isn’t readily available on some of the scripts that would just benefit from it and lose nothing if it was there.
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sample slicing has this weird stigma… already around for decades, clearly an established art form but the ‘forward thinking devs’ are the ones who always seem to conveniently overlook tossing in a simple chop shop ,
Haha yes 
and triggered recording.
I remember when I brought it up in the norns community. Some of the more prominent devs were like “Sounds interesting. Tell us more. What’d you use it for?”
I felt, at that point, I didn’t quite know what to say. I was also fresh from a discussion on how a midi sequencer could work, after having tried Kria and suggesting “Just do it like the Deluge. You already do it in Awake. Just do that, but polyphonic. And you got a bare bones version of the Deluge.” And some were like, “But what’d you use it for?”
So, yeah 
I’d like to underline that I’m sharing these stories with nothing but love and compassion for that community. It’s a fantastic place and monome gear are amazing.
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The norns scripts are usually made for a specific use case by a specfic person. I don’t get the impression there’s a lot of initial thought or intent to cover the use cases of others, or research done to find “standard” features/capabilities with regards to “market”.
I think “what’d you use it for” is a multi-layered question. The devs all seem really open to suggestions and adding features, but they also rightly consider the usefulness to themselves and the appropriateness to the spirit of the original script, how the UI functions, etc.
edit – I don’t think many of us over there do a lot of syncing 
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This is all very true. This is the real upside and downside of norns. One should approach it with no expectations and simply be mesmerized by each thing it can do and not think about what it can’t do (yet), unless it’s for the purpose of creating such an application oneself
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