I have a 2020-vintage monome grid and a norns shield. These are not musical instruments; they’re pieces of an instrument, things you can use to build very powerful loopers, synths, controllers, and so forth. At the moment, my favorite norns script is mlre, a looper/tape emulator based on Brian Crabtree’s mlr, which is itself based on Ezra Buchla’s softcut engine.
The grid is an 8x16, well, grid. It’s a machined aluminum enclosure with little half-inch silicone pads sticking out, each of which has an LED behind it. They can vary in brightness, but not color, which makes it possible to build user interfaces which are not intuitive but are extremely memorable. I didn’t understand this when I first got my grid; I spent a lot of time trying to “make sense of” the interfaces presented on grid by things like takt and arcologies, when what I should have been doing is practicing.
The grid is an OSC-based device; it does nothing on its own. It needs a controller of some kind to drive it. Originally, these were Eurorack modules like ansible and meadowphysics, then teletype. There is a C library called libmonome for using grids with PCs, and I’ve had truly unreasonable amounts of fun playing with the meadowphysics VCVRack 2 module. I hear that newer grids have experimental support for a mode called iii which allows them to act as rudamentary MIDI devices by themselves.
For me, though, grid is primarily part of my norns, alongside my 16n faderbank.
Þaðan koma meyjar margs vitandi þrjár ór þeim sæ, er und þolli stendr; Urð hétu eina, aðra Verðandi, - skáru á skíði, - Skuld ina þriðju; þær lög lögðu, þær líf kuru alda börnum, örlög seggja.
- Völuspá 20 (Guðni Jónsson’s normalized spelling)
Thence come the maidens mighty in wisdom, three from the dwelling down ’neath the tree; Urth is one named, Verthandi the next,– on the wood they scored,– and Skuld the third. Laws they made there, and life allotted to the sons of men, and set their fates.
- tr. Henry Adams Bellows 1936
The Norns are the fates of Norse mythology, three women who set the fates of mortals and gods alike. monome’s norns is a Raspberry Pi single-board computer with a high-quality audio codec, a very pretty low-res but large-pixel monochrome OLED screen, three endless encoders, and three buttons. (The version they sell has a battery and 1/4-inch inputs.) It’s a normalized platform for building instruments with other musical gear, with high-performance parts like synthesizers and effects written in SuperCollider and interface code written in Lua against a very accessible set of APIs. A great deal of thought went into the environment that programmers have access to; for instance, it’s almost easier to make the parameters of a script legible to the system’s preset-saving mechanisms than not, and doing so nets you MIDI mapping for free. Norns doesn’t improve or change; even as faster SBCs have come out, the monome team have kept the available resources the same. It’s the right move.
By itself, norns can route MIDI, record and play back audio, and acts as a reverb and delay. It’s pretty useful for this purpose, and you don’t need any monome gear to make it do even more than that, but because norns was born into the monome community, it has very good support for grid (and arc, the monome controller I don’t have.) The company has ported their grids modules to the platform, Brian Crabtree’s mlr works a treat on the little box, and there is an enormous library of community-written programs for norns that is growing by the day (with discussion over on the Lines forum.) norns is a machine that takes interfaces - grids, 16n, arc, any MIDI controller ever made - and connects them with ideas. norns is a portal into the edge of what is possible in human-machine interface. It’s also adorable.
Some recommendations, if you’re looking to get into the ecosystem:
My norns was my most faithful companion when I was heavily into modular. Now that I’m not making music that way anymore, I’ve been hooking it up to Bitwig on my Steam Deck and using it as a looper, sampler, or effects box, as the music demands.
I <3 norns and grid.