Nord User Forum

Hi All!

I recently decided to pare down the rig I use for my weekly gig. Hauling all of that gear every week (SV-1, laptop, interface, etc.) was a little over the top!

So I have gone to a setup with just the NS3 Compact and a smaller pedalboard with sustain, two Moog EP-3s, and a Boss FS-7.

When I use my large rig with MainStage I can control the volume of each panel separately just using MIDI on MS's channel strips, but now that I'm going direct to the Nord I have fewer options.

Right now I have one of the Moog pedals going into the Control Pedal jack and the other going into the Organ Swell jack. I have the Organ Swell jack set to volume so it controls the output of the whole board, and then I have been assigning any sounds on Panel A to have their volume morphed by the Control Pedal.

It's not ideal, but at least I can set up schemes that will work. For example, say I have a pad on Panel B and a piano on Panel A. Panel A is turned down via the Control Pedal and the overall volume is also down. Then I bring up the overall volume while playing the Panel B pad, which fades its sound in. Then with the pad playing (maybe a drone with key hold on) I would bring up the volume of Panel A while playing the piano sound.

This simulates having separate volume control of the Panels fairly well except for the glaring fact that I can never have Panel A playing alone. If I bring down the Organ Swell pedal it brings down the whole board's volume.

I might be able to make things a bit more flexible by adding in the mod wheel as a volume morph. It sure would be nice to have locally separate control over the Panel volume.

Am I missing something or is there a better way?

Thanks!

Dave

stringtapper wrote:Am I missing something or is there a better way?

Hi Dave,

Not being challenged by any knowledge about morphing with pedals but how about doing the inverse on Panel B ?
So when you push down the pedal, Volume panel A goes down and Volume panel B goes up, and vice versa ofcourse.

Then with the other pedal you could bring up the volume in total like you're doing now.

Might be challenging for the getting the right balance, but it's something

RichardG wrote:Hi Dave,

Not being challenged by any knowledge about morphing with pedals but how about doing the inverse on Panel B ?
So when you push down the pedal, Volume panel A goes down and Volume panel B goes up, and vice versa ofcourse.

Then with the other pedal you could bring up the volume in total like you're doing now.

Might be challenging for the getting the right balance, but it's something

Thanks for your reply Richard!

Yes, that's definitely another option to try the crossfade route. I suspect that I will eventually land at a solution that involves doing some combination of what I'm doing now, the crossfade scheme, and the addition of the mod wheel.

I wonder how difficult it would be for Clavia to program the Control Pedal and Organ Swell inputs to route directly to the volume control of each panel?

couldn't you use a midi volume peddle to get direct control of each panel volume?

cgrafx wrote:couldn't you use a midi volume peddle to get direct control of each panel volume?

You can if you have a way to send each pedal to a different MIDI channel corresponding to each of the panels. I could do it with my large rig:

Roland FC-300 expression pedals sending MIDI on one channel to MainStage + expression pedal messages routed to two different MIDI channels corresponding to the MIDI channels set on the Nord's panels = one pedal for each panel's volume.

I am trying to streamline things and so I'm not using any MIDI at all with this particular setup. Just direct connections to the Nord.

could you use something like this to accomplish what your after: http://www.midisolutions.com/prodped.htm

It would only be one extra small box and still a single cable to the NS3. Just a midi cable instead of the volume pedal cable.

cgrafx wrote:could you use something like this to accomplish what your after: http://www.midisolutions.com/prodped.htm

It would only be one extra small box and still a single cable to the NS3. Just a midi cable instead of the volume pedal cable.

It would work for one pedal, but I have two and the goal is to be able to always have one pedal per panel controlling volume separately. Even if I got two of those boxes I would probably then need a MIDI merger of some sort to get each of the MIDI signals into the Nord (and on different channels).

I may eventually cave and get one (or two!) of these things:

https://www.sourceaudio.net/reflex-expr ... oller.html

I do a similar thing with an iPad connected via the camera adapter to my Stage 2. On the iPad I use the App Midiflow to convert data from the Organ Swell input.