Electro 6 HP limitations?

[cruiser152]

I’m a relative newcomer to Nord, having recently bought an Electro 6 HP, which I’m loving more and more, the more familiar I become with it. I play the keyboard in a newly formed semi-acoustic trio, consisting of myself, a guitarist (semi acoustic) and a female singer.
I find I’m mostly using a split keyboard, playing one of the excellent synth section basses in the LH and mostly B3/piano in the RH. This brings me to my ‘dilemma’:

There are occasions when I’d love to be able to use a synth sample in the RH (e.g, brass, harmonica etc.) on top of the bass in the LH. As far as I’m aware - please correct me if I’m wrong - this is not possible with the 6 HP and I’d need to buy another keyboard/synth in order to achieve my objective? I’m not really interested in getting a ‘raw’ analogue synth.

[maxpiano]

Hi, in general you can't since you only have 1 synth section, but you can create pre-split samples, read more about it in this older discussion nord-electro-forum-f9/kbd-split-t21004.html

[Papamotif]

When I do gig where I play the bass part I use Mainstage or my iPad for the bass sound via midi and my Electro 6 for the keyboardsounds!!! Much better thsn using the Electro for bass….

[Nadroj]

When I do gig where I play the bass part I use Mainstage or my iPad for the bass sound via midi and my Electro 6 for the keyboardsounds!!! Much better thsn using the Electro for bass….

Doesn't that mean that when you play the bass part from the Electro 6 it's playing over the whole keyboard? There's no way to split MIDI zones over the keys, is there?

[alex78]

If you need a sample synth for your right hand, why don't you use the B3 organ for bass on the left?

[harmonizer]

There might be certain songs on which the bass sound from a B3 organ, EP Rhodes (Piano Bank), or one of the Acoustic Piano sounds (Piano Bank) might work. I am guessing this might provide a partial solution for you. But there will probably be some songs when these options don't work at all.

Some of the Acoustic Piano patches sound anemic at the low end. The Royal Grand piano sound has a pretty good low end. There might be other AP sounds that are even better.

[Nadroj]

I just used bass as an example because it's what the poster above said. My point is that there's no way to play an external synth from the Electro 6's keys without it covering the whole keyboard. If I have a synth lead coming from a module, I can't split it with piano, organ or samples - it's going to play over all of those, because the E6 only has one MIDI channel for the whole keyboard.

[maxpiano]

I just used bass as an example because it's what the poster above said. My point is that there's no way to play an external synth from the Electro 6's keys without it covering the whole keyboard. If I have a synth lead coming from a module, I can't split it with piano, organ or samples - it's going to play over all of those, because the E6 only has one MIDI channel for the whole keyboard.

There is a way, but only if you use a computer with a VST Host and MIDI Router application like MainStage (as Papamotif wrote), or Camelot Pro, Cantabile etc.: you put the NE6 in Local Off and use it as a master keyboard only, letting the computer application manage splits, layers etc. so that it will send back to NE sound engine (on Global Channel and/or Extern to Lo) only the zones you want it to play and same to the other synths (or Virtual Instruments).

In other words with Local Off you separate the NE6 into 1 master keyboard and a "3 sections over 2 MIDI channels" expander

[fieldflower]

You can also get away with only a MIDI keyboard.
When using Layer and having a MIDI board playing Upper receive You get both sounds on the Nord keybed and only the Upper sound on the MIDI keybed.
At least this is how it works on my NE5D.

You'd still have to lug around another keyboard, but with this solution it could be small and inexpensive.