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Panning, and Layers Electro 6D

Postby Airegin70 » 29 Aug 2019, 07:36

I just got my Electro 6, and it's a monster. I had hoped that I could
A: Split for bass and hard pan the sound so I could run it to a bass amp for
kicking bass gigs. I'm not finding an easy way to do this so far.
B: I'm wondering if it's possible to have a layered sound in one hand, and bass in the other at all?
My main boards my whole career have been RD's. I can do this with them, but they are huge, and not many sounds.
Any help or thoughts on these two topics would be greatly appreciated!!!
Thanks!
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Panning, and Layers Electro 6D


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Re: Panning, and Layers Electro 6D

Postby anotherscott » 29 Aug 2019, 13:42

Airegin70 wrote:I had hoped that I could
A: Split for bass and hard pan the sound so I could run it to a bass amp for
kicking bass gigs. I'm not finding an easy way to do this so far.

The only "hard pan to dual mono" option is organ out one side (useful for sending it to a Leslie or external simulator), with everything else out the other side. The Electro 5 had an advantage here, you could essentially pan any sound to either side (i.e. your left/lower sound would come out one jack. your right/upper sound would come out the other), but you'd still run into the problem of not being able to split two sounds from the same section. So if picked a bass guitar sound for the lower, your upper sound could only be a piano or organ. Though you could work around that some by picking less traditional bass sounds from the other sections... i.e. you could pick a Rhodes bass sound (Ray Manzarek style) in order to free up the sample section for alternate right hand sounds.

Airegin70 wrote:B: I'm wondering if it's possible to have a layered sound in one hand, and bass in the other at all? My main boards my whole career have been RD's. I can do this with them, but they are huge, and not many sounds.

I don't have the E6, but I believe you can freely assign which side of a split each of three sounds is on (one organ, one piano, one sample synth), so you could pick a bass sound for the left and a layered piano+organ for the right, or similar to what I said above, you could pick a Rhodes bass sound for your left and a layered organ+sample synth for your right, or possibly an organ bass sound for the left and a layered piano+sample synth for your right.

Electro is not really the right tool for LH bass, where yes, it is often desirable to be able to send bass out its own output and/or layer whatever other two sounds you want in your RH. My suggestion for a non-hammer action keyboard in a similar price range that can do both of these things and also give you real-time drawbar organ control is the Kurzweil Artis 7. Roland FA-06/FA-07 come close, but you have to adjust the drawbars through a menu instead of real-time sliders (Ocean Beach DIgital made a drawbar accessory that would work, but it's discontinued and hard to find). A nice thing about the Roland, though, is it has an assignable "sub out" so you can send the bass out there and still have stereo (instead of mono) out for everything else. And by combining that with panning, you could also send its organ sound out to an external rotary pedal, which you'd likely want to do because its internal rotary sim is not so great.

Sticking with the E6, one fix would be to supplement with a small second board which you could use just for bass, like maybe a Yamaha MX49. (And it happens to do a lot of other cool things besides).

Or, use an iOS device (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) using an app for a bass guitar sound (and/or other sounds you want to layer) and use an app like iMidiPatchbay which will let you mix and match your Nord sounds with your iOS sounds and save the various combinations as recallable presets. IIRC, integrating the Nord and iOS sounds this way requires operating the Nord in its Local Off mode (so the app controls all sound routing) which means losing the organ "high trigger point" option of the Nord, but I think everything else would work as expected.

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Re: Panning, and Layers Electro 6D

Postby Airegin70 » 29 Aug 2019, 20:01

Thanks so much for the reply, and all the useful info! I thought about doing bass on 2 different keys. I was trying to move to just one. I'm going to explore it. I have an MX61, nice sounds there too. I can't really tie up my Ipad with it, but maybe if I can read charts and have that setup running. I have Ipad pro latest, so it should.
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Re: Panning, and Layers Electro 6D

Postby anotherscott » 29 Aug 2019, 20:28

Airegin70 wrote:Thanks so much for the reply, and all the useful info! I thought about doing bass on 2 different keys. I was trying to move to just one. I'm going to explore it. I have an MX61, nice sounds there too. I can't really tie up my Ipad with it, but maybe if I can read charts and have that setup running. I have Ipad pro latest, so it should.

You should be able to run iMidiPatchbay and your sound app(s) of choice in the background while leaving your charts visible in the iPad. The trick will be in managing patch changes, where you may need to bring iMidiPatchbay to the front to do the patch change, and then switch back to your chart. If your chart-reading app sends MIDI (like Set List Maker), you might be able to send iMidiPatchbay the patch change commands from there. There's also some multi-window (i.e. multiple visible apps) capabilities on the iPad Pro (at least the bigger one), so maybe that would be a benefit too, I don't know. If iMidiPatchbay doesn't do it, there are some other similar programs that might... Keystage and Camelot Pro, at least.

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Re: Panning, and Layers Electro 6D

Postby Airegin70 » 30 Aug 2019, 07:40

I'm rather midi illiterate honestly, but couldn't I use a small controller to play the bass sounds from the Electro? Or would I have to get them from somewhere else? Ipad etc.
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Re: Panning, and Layers Electro 6D

Postby anotherscott » 30 Aug 2019, 15:53

Airegin70 wrote:I'm rather midi illiterate honestly, but couldn't I use a small controller to play the bass sounds from the Electro?

Yes you could, but regardless of what keys you trigger its sounds from, the Electro still cannot pan its bass sound to a separate output, and the Electro still cannot play a bass sound from its sample/synth section and another sound from its sample/synth section simultaneously. The only advantage to playing the E6D's bass sound from a small external controller instead of from its own keys is that you would still have the full 61 (or 73) keys of your Electro available for your simultaneous piano or organ playing, instead of having to steal away a couple of octaves for your bass playing.

If you get the bass sound from your iPad, your iPad itself becomes your separate output for your bass sound, and it means your Nord can be used to play any Nord sounds from any of its sections.

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