Nord User Forum

As the title says. I want to plug my nord Drum into my midi keyboard and use it as a synth as well. I have been successful but its only on 1 channel. I can choose channel 1-6. Can I play it as a 6 voice synth or is it only Mono???

Should be possible to get this thing to be able to play some chords as midi no? Knowing my luck it most likely wont be as simple as plugging my midi in and playing. Everything needs to be so difficult.

Any ideas how I can use this as a synth with midi keyboard and play chords?

Naughty Nord 4P wrote:As the title says. I want to plug my nord Drum into my midi keyboard and use it as a synth as well. I have been successful but its only on 1 channel. I can choose channel 1-6. Can I play it as a 6 voice synth or is it only Mono???

Should be possible to get this thing to be able to play some chords as midi no? Knowing my luck it most likely wont be as simple as plugging my midi in and playing. Everything needs to be so difficult.

Any ideas how I can use this as a synth with midi keyboard and play chords?

Since the Nord Drum is 6 Monotimbral channels, it is unlikely that the pads can be triggered as chords unless your controller can send from 6 zones. From page 14 of the manual:

MIDI CONTROLLER
A MIDI Fader box or Controller can be used to have full control of all
parameters on all Nord Drum 3P channels. Such a setup would use the
individual MIDI Channels. Make sure that each Nord Drum 3P Channel is
set to an exclusive MIDI Channel.


-dj

DJKeys wrote:

Naughty Nord 4P wrote:As the title says. I want to plug my nord Drum into my midi keyboard and use it as a synth as well. I have been successful but its only on 1 channel. I can choose channel 1-6. Can I play it as a 6 voice synth or is it only Mono???

Should be possible to get this thing to be able to play some chords as midi no? Knowing my luck it most likely wont be as simple as plugging my midi in and playing. Everything needs to be so difficult.

Any ideas how I can use this as a synth with midi keyboard and play chords?

Since the Nord Drum is 6 Monotimbral channels, it is unlikely that the pads can be triggered as chords unless your controller can send from 6 zones. From page 14 of the manual:

MIDI CONTROLLER
A MIDI Fader box or Controller can be used to have full control of all
parameters on all Nord Drum 3P channels. Such a setup would use the
individual MIDI Channels. Make sure that each Nord Drum 3P Channel is
set to an exclusive MIDI Channel.


-dj

Thats what I thought! Thanks!

I've used an RK-002 to do a simple voice assignment for the ND2. It works with the 3P as well. Basically i have my kick, snare and hihat as normal, and then the last three voices are copies of each other and then the midi keyboard input cycles the channels 4, 5, and 6. This way i have a three voice polyphonic synth on those channels.

Any way to do a midi channel multiplexer will work and you can build synths from 1-6 voices of polyphony. Of course, with six voices you no longer have any other drum sounds available.

Exactly right, I did something similar with the Blokas midihub, made the nd2 into a very compact 6 voice polyphonic synth for melodies or chords. You can even let the note length depend on how long you press a key by increasing the decay time to the highest value (longest) at note on, and decrease again to the minimum at note off.

wartaler wrote:Exactly right, I did something similar with the Blokas midihub, made the nd2 into a very compact 6 voice polyphonic synth for melodies or chords. You can even let the note length depend on how long you press a key by increasing the decay time to the highest value (longest) at note on, and decrease again to the minimum at note off.

Amazing! I've been using a midi round robin script in Reaper. But I've always longed for note length control. Can you please describe how you set that up (I thought the ND2 didnt have note on/off?). Many thanks mate.

Hi Stoat,

Step 1
The first step is indeed the easiest; to dispatch simultaneous notes (chords) from a keyboard or MIDI track into the 6 MIDI channels of the ND2 (or 3p). These notes will have note on, and (some form of) note off messages.

Step 2
Now the notes are all in separate MIDI channels, transform all note-on messages into CC50 value 127 (longest tone decay), CC21 value 127 (longest noise decay). Transform note-off messages into CC50 value 0 and CC21 value 0. Merge these newly generated CC messages back with the notes from step 1 / make sure that you still include the note on messages when sending it all to the ND2/3p.

I also tried channel level, which would perhaps be a more logical target CC for this, but this caused some clicking artifacts. You can of course experiment with max and min decay values, it doesn't have to be 127 and 0.

In the midihub there is a transformer 'pipe', I bet there are MIDI plugins that can do this conversion if your DAW can't do this natively..


Cheers,
Albert

Wonderful - thank you

Edit: just to add for others, I'm using this for the round robin (https://stash.reaper.fm/v/415/MIDI%20Ch ... Router.txt), and I'm going to try this (http://www.bewaryprods.com/software/pro ... index.html) for the midi note to CC transform. TBH the Blokas midihub looks the best way, on the Santa list

Here is how I set it up in Cubase: nord-drum-forum-f27/synth-sounds-with-n ... tml#p45072 I used some of these plugins: http://thepiz.org/plugins/?p=pizmidi (midiPolyphony and midiConverter3). I like the Blokas Midihub for its ease of use, the BomeBox by Bome should also be able to do this I guess with the 'MIDI translator Pro' software

I forgot how easy it is with the Midihub; in the dispatcher 'pipe' (block) you just tick the desired output MIDI channels. I also needed 2 transformation pipes: one to set a long tone decay at note on, one to set a short note decay at note off. I didn't include control over noise decay, but that would only require 2 additional pipes. The transformation pipes can process all MIDI channels at the same time, and you can decide if you want to replace the original note-on/off messages with the newly generated CC, or simply add the new CC messages, keeping the original note-on messages.