Nord Stage 3 randomizer

[Hlaalu]

@Lamacanyon: apparently I was the only who didn't find it too interesting. Apologies if I was too harsh in my response. I hope you won't take these misunderstandings as reasons not to post anymore.

[neomad]

@Lamacanyon very good, thanks for sharing, really. Very interesting indeed !

[Kaffimusic]

Heya, I am one of the (bad) guys who is selling a bunch of sounds on the internet.
However, I fully agree with CountNumbe.. err Fosco. Do not judge your welcome or thanks by a small number of answers. Your work is greatly welcome and pretty sure an interesting way to approach sound-design.
I doubt someone who has no clue how to do stuff will do any good with that, but as starting point for new ideas, this might come in very handy. Depends on how balanced the parameters are set. I am willing to give it a try.
Now that the malware-discussion is done, for my part, I would really thank you for re-uploading it. I guess the time your stuff was available was too short for people to come by and take a closer look.

And, I might add, I am not only selling sounds, the times I gave away lots of stuff for free all my life, can never be returned with what I am selling now. Should have done this much earlier.

[Hlaalu]

Well renewed apologies to the OP if I was being too harsh. A combination of the topic, tones, and possibly me having a bad day... if you're still reading, I take that back. It seems that a lot of people are interested in this kind of content.

[Lamacanyon]

Ok, trying again. https://stash.reaper.fm/41516/Nord.zip
Scan with antivirus before doing anything with it. I am still worried that because it can only be used in Reaper it excludes anybody who does not want to use that DAW from having fun with this thing. Once more apologies in advance.

Anyway, this is a JS effect that can be used in Reaper to randomise just about anything that a midi CC can control on the Nord. The "Nord Stage 3" file and the "download.png" need to go into the same folder (or sub folder) in Reaper's "Effects" folder. There is also a Nord edit.RTrackTemplate file that can be placed in Reaper's "TrackTemplates" folder that may help people not familiar with Reaper who are trying to get this thing to work. It is not easy if you are just starting out in Reaper - you have to enable the Nord's midi ins and outs in the preferences first (including a separate tick box to enable cc control on the midi input port) and then setting up a track involves arming it, enabling input monitoring, setting what midi input to use and also setting up a midi hardware output. Loading the track template may help here.

Randomising can be refined - for example I was getting tired of having to turn the arpeggiator off so a switch was added to stop that being (possibly) invoked. The script itself can be edited within Reaper, so anything not needed could at least be commented out with a couple of //'s and the script then resaved - or even re-coded. Also the user could easily change the descriptions of the controls to something more preferable, maybe to another language?

Having a look at the comments in the code (via Reaper's editor) could also be helpful in a general understanding of the Nord Stage 3 as I detail the CC ranges that many of the buttons respond to.

The piano section is my main worry - I do not have many pianos installed, so people might get a lot of "piano not found" messages appearing on the Nord's display. Please allow for the fact that this effect was only tested on one machine.

I'll stop there. Have fun.

PS - Reaper can be installed as a portable install on a usb stick btw. So PC users need not inflate their registry whilst performing a speculative evaluation.
And no criticism of people who sell patches was intended. I was encouraging more people to do the same.

Edit - I had also better say that this software is used at the owner’s risk. For example, i do not know if continuously causing all the Nord’s leds to change in one go is something the circuitry of the keyboard was designed to cope with. But if the Randomise slider is continuously clicked that is what will happen - a light show.

[Hobster]

Ok, trying again. https://stash.reaper.fm/manage_file/41516/Nord.zip

You need to remove manage_file/ from the link, but thanks for posting

[Hlaalu]

The piano section is my main worry - I do not have many pianos installed, so people might get a lot of "piano not found" messages appearing on the Nord's display. Please allow for the fact that this effect was only tested on one machine.

Thanks for putting this back on. Regarding the above point you raise, if everything is controlled by CC messages, including which Piano to select, I don't see how many pianos being installed on your machine could ever influence what happens on other users' machines. The more pianos one has, the less likely that message is to appear, but perhaps, if the goal is to make that message not to appear at all, you could implement, similarly to what you did with the arpeggiator, a feature that lets the user restrict the value range of CC #36 and especially #37, according to how many pianos one has installed for each category.

So as an example. Let's say one has only 5 acoustic pianos installed, out of 20 slots available for the Acoustic type (I think they're 20, I may be wrong, but you get the point). Each of these 20 slots will be comprised in a CC value range roughly between 6 and 7 (0, 6, 12, 18,... 127). The randomiser will firstly select the "piano type" (CC #36), then the "piano model" (CC #37). You could program it so that, if CC #36 falls onto Acoustic (values 0-25 roughly?), then CC #37 has to be comprised between 0 (1st piano) and 25 (5th piano). Then if one only has one single electric piano, if CC #36 falls onto Electric, then CC #37 has to be between 0 and 5, so to give always that only piano. And so on.

I hope my explanation was clear enough...

[Lamacanyon]

The piano section is my main worry - I do not have many pianos installed, so people might get a lot of "piano not found" messages appearing on the Nord's display. Please allow for the fact that this effect was only tested on one machine.

Thanks for putting this back on. Regarding the above point you raise, if everything is controlled by CC messages, including which Piano to select, I don't see how many pianos being installed on your machine could ever influence what happens on other users' machines. The more pianos one has, the less likely that message is to appear, but perhaps, if the goal is to make that message not to appear at all, you could implement, similarly to what you did with the arpeggiator, a feature that lets the user restrict the value range of CC #36 and especially #37, according to how many pianos one has installed for each category.

So as an example. Let's say one has only 5 acoustic pianos installed, out of 20 slots available for the Acoustic type (I think they're 20, I may be wrong, but you get the point). Each of these 20 slots will be comprised in a CC value range roughly between 6 and 7 (0, 6, 12, 18,... 127). The randomiser will firstly select the "piano type" (CC #36), then the "piano model" (CC #37). You could program it so that, if CC #36 falls onto Acoustic (values 0-25 roughly?), then CC #37 has to be comprised between 0 (1st piano) and 25 (5th piano). Then if one only has one single electric piano, if CC #36 falls onto Electric, then CC #37 has to be between 0 and 5, so to give always that only piano. And so on.

I hope my explanation was clear enough...

Hi, firstly I'd point out that the software I'm using is rather limited. You just get sliders to provide user input out of the box. Doing anything more, graphically, requires more skill than I possess.
Therefore I allowed the user to force the use of a certain piano type = grand, but after that I've had to limit what can be selected for the piano model within that piano type in order to reduce the piano-not-found messages as much s possible. Here is an example of the Upright piano types in my machine for a given CC value for CC 37.....

// 0 to 6 == Amber Upright
// 7 to 38 == NOT FOUND
// 39 to 44 == Rain Piano
// 45 to 51 == Romantic upright
// 52 to 57 == Blue Swede
// 58 to 63 == Saloon Upright
// 64 onwards - piano not found on my config

As you can see, there is a not found early on which is a bit annoying. So I put in some code to cope with it. But adding extra graphical sliders for the user to sort this out for each of the piano types is for me, a little too much when all that has to be done is turn the relevant knob on the stage 3 until something is found.

The user can influence the following - Oscillator bank type, Organ Model, Piano type, Synth filter type, keyboard hold, synth arpeggiator and finally rotary drive. The first 4 force the use of a certain one. The final 3 either deny the use or allow a random selection of on or off. At this point I was getting a bit tired of the thing so the values selectable were given a mildly comic value.

[Hlaalu]

Here is an example of the Upright piano types in my machine for a given CC value for CC 37.....

// 0 to 6 == Amber Upright
// 7 to 38 == NOT FOUND
// 39 to 44 == Rain Piano
// 45 to 51 == Romantic upright
// 52 to 57 == Blue Swede
// 58 to 63 == Saloon Upright
// 64 onwards - piano not found on my config

As you can see, there is a not found early on which is a bit annoying.

It may be me, but I was, and still am, assuming that for the Stage the values for CC#37 from 0 to 127 don't actually "mean" any specific piano from the Library but "whatever piano is on slot n. X" on your particular machine. To me, the above list would indicate that you have the second slot of your Upright pianos list empty. Forgive me if I ask the obvious perhaps, but have you checked inside the Nord Sound Manager if there's indeed an empty slot in the second place of your Upright pianos?

Still, what I am not sure I understand is how any slot being empty is relevant in terms of the likelihood for the "not found" message to pop up. If the Stage 3 can contain up to, say, 20 Upright piano slots*, and your machine has, say, only 5 occupied by actual pianos, then the order in which you sort them can't affect how likely it is for that message to appear, because the randomiser will just throw in any value between 0 and 127. In this example, the "not found" will appear 15 times out of 20 regardless of the order...

On the contrary, if you sort those 5 pianos to be in the first 5 slots on your Stage 3, then tell the randomiser not to go past value 57, you won't have any "not found" error altogether, but the bigger risk is that, having each Nord a different number of piano loaded, you can't know where that upper "limit" should be put for each user: if one has, say, 10 Uprights, only the first 5 will show up for him and the remaining will never do. If one has less than 5, same not found message...

If setting up IF/THEN commands is too complex, then I don't see any other solution than NOT restricting in any way the value range for the CC #37. Those "not found" messages are inevitable in this way but at least you won't be excluding any piano from any user's keyboard.

Am I getting what your doubt is about right?

*I can't check right now, probably 20 is too high a number for uprights but the thing that matters is that it is a fixed number.