NerDie - 8 bit Noise Machine

NerDie is an 8-bit noise machine for iPad and iPhone: four oscillators, four LFOs, a summing tree with eight algorithms, a resonant low-pass filter and a one-bar sequencer. Thirty-two registers, integer arithmetic, mono output — the sound of a chip rather than a picture of one.

The engine runs in whole numbers at a fixed chip rate. Overflow, wrap and quantisation are not added afterwards to make it sound old: they are the signal itself.

It runs on its own or as an AUv3 instrument on a MIDI track in any host that loads them, in portrait and in landscape.

THE MACHINE
• 4 oscillators, 16 waveforms each, 19 to 1350 Hz
• 4 LFOs, 8 shapes, moving pitch or volume — free-running in Hz, or multipliers of the clock up to x128 with the phase reset on every tick
• 3 summing topologies x 3 nodes x 8 algorithms: addition, overflow, subtraction, ring modulation, XOR, FM and wave-shaping — 1,536 ways to add four voices together
• 8-bit resonant low-pass filter that self-oscillates at the top of its travel
• One-bar sequencer with overdub, recorded finer than a sixteenth-note grid, driven by the internal clock, the host transport or MIDI clock
• 32 registers on 8 pages of 4 pots, with optional hardware-style pot pickup
• Four chip rates — 15625, 31250, 62500, 78125 Hz — and three outputs: RAW, CLEAN, TAPE

TWO KINDS OF ACCIDENT
CHAOS throws every register at once, the way the machine does, and sometimes lands on silence. RND builds a whole patch, renders it and measures it before handing it over, so it always makes a sound. UNDO brings back what you had.

MADE FOR GLASS
Drag a knob up and down for the coarse move and sideways for the fine one, eight times slower, without lifting your finger. Long press to type a value in its real unit - Hz, ms, %, the name of a waveform - to reset it, or to assign a MIDI CC with MIDI Learn. Double tap for the default. Two knobs turn at once, and the four pads are played with as many fingers as you like. Pinch the panel up to 250% and drag it around; the top bar and the value strip never scale, so the preset name and the register you are turning stay readable at any zoom.

MPE
The four oscillators become four MPE voices. Press, slide, strike and bend pass through a matrix that decides what each one moves — tuning, level, waveform, LFO depth, filter cutoff — with a response curve per gesture. Controllers reach the app over Bluetooth or a Camera Connection Kit, and reach the AUv3 through its host.

THREE FACES
The pixel panel with its four pots and page buttons; the matrix, with all 32 registers on screen at once; and a photograph of the circuit with the controls mounted on it.

PRESETS
45 factory presets in nine folders — Bass, Drones, FX, Glitch, Melodic, Noise, Rhythms, Sequenced, Init — installed on the first run. The ones you save live in the Files app under On My iPad / NerDie / Presets, so you can copy them out or drop new ones in. The .ner format is identical to the desktop version and travels in both directions. Presets