Nord User Forum

I have the Electro 5D currently being used as a keyboard for controlling a couple of synths. However, I cannot find a way to transpose up or down an octave on the Electro (the only way to do it it to increase / decrease the frequency of the patches on the synths themselves).

Does anyone know a way to do this direct on the Electro?

Sorry to bump.. anyone have an answer to this one?

Sorry, bumping again...

You cannot do that, the NE will always transmit the "physical" octave of its keys so you need to switch the octave on the target MIDI slave = the synths.

Note: Nord Stage allows to specify a different octave thanks to its Extern section, instead.

Does anyone know if there is an external solution for this that doesn't require having to go to each track in the DAW to change the octave? For example, in Cubase I would need to open the Inspector > MIDI Modifiers > Transpose every time I need to change the octave. Is the some kind of hardware or software that will transform the octave with the press of a button?

Check page 14 of the Electro 5 manual. If your external synth is assigned to PART UPPER on its own MIDI channel, transpose and octave shift should be transmitted by the E5. It should work.

Nadroj wrote:Check page 14 of the Electro 5 manual. If your external synth is assigned to PART UPPER on its own MIDI channel, transpose and octave shift should be transmitted by the E5. It should work.

It only sends MIDI starting at the split point. I don't want the keyboard split. I want the whole keyboard to send MIDI and be able to change octave. I did what the manual says, set MIDI Split to Upper Receive but doesn't work.

maxpiano, Nadroj - thanks for the replies!

davidmolina - I think you need to NOT set it to Upper Receive - otherwise the Electro is waiting for incoming signals rather than transmitting. Take it off Receive, and plug in your external synth / module etc. via MIDI. Then all you need to do is to ensure the MIDI channel is set correctly, and voila! <EDIT> You need to ensure the split mode is enabled in the MIDI menu too. <END OF EDIT>

It's a shame you cannot use the whole keybed as a controller, I wonder if that's something that can be changed in an OS patch. The lowest split point you can choose is C3, which cuts out an octave of the keyboard - especially if you have a 61 key 5D like me. But, this still gives me a 4 octave keyboard to use this with, so very happy for now.

Thanks again for your responses!

Well I found a solution to this using the Event Processor Plus. See the attached code. Here, if you press the octave +/- buttons for the Lower/upper parts, it will basically turn on/off settings on the fly that will effectively shift the octaves as if you were using a dedicated octave shift button.

Tested it out and it works perfectly.

When using the electro as a controller, I like to clear out an entire bank of blank programs and just call them "MIDI Controller", and make sure that they don't make sound by just turning off both parts. (Sure, you could do this with 'local' off but this is faster...). In this regard, the electro will function exactly as a MIDI controller, with all of the knobs transmitting CC's. In thinking of it, its quite a good controller, with more knobs than even dedicated controllers! No mod wheel, but set the expression to control modulation.