S3 patch organisation

[PupmaTz]

Hi all,

Very happy new Nord Stage 3 owner here! Until now I was gigging with a Komplete MK2 (laptop dependant) which gives you more freedom in terms of sound creation but you have to worry about laptop on stage, can't really change much on the fly plus I find digital sound on stage hard to balance compared to analog.

Just wrapping my head around the Stage 3 now - read a lot about clearing memory space, song and live mode etc. but I was just hoping to get some inspiration and ideas on how people have organised their sounds for live gigs:

I'm curious how people switch from one sound patch to another and store their sets for their band projects etc. especially if it's for function songs where you have 30 + songs to go through. I'm thinking about having individual piano, electric piano and organ patches ready to go as those are needed in lots of songs and then having programs ready for individual songs where you have i.e synth, electric piano and strings in one program. I can put all programs then in order I guess depending on the setlist.

Is that a smart way or how do you guys do it? Do you use song mode or just switch through programs via banks? Do you maybe not even have programs organised beforehand and do everything on the fly? (amazing how the Stage 3 allows this..)

Would be great to hear your ways of getting through gigs!

Thanks in advance

T

[WannitBBBad]

Hello, and welcome to the Forum! There are quite a few options given Song mode being available. I have my programs arranged by title (multiple programs used for the same song adjacent as well) and use Song mode to put together setlists that simply point to the programs I want to use. Others arrange their programs by type (pianos, organs, brass,..) or other ways they are used to, as the program list mode let you view the programs alphabetically or by type. Live mode let's you move between your 5 favorite programs with any setting adjustments (saved automatically) and your programs/songs.

[EricBarker]

Hi, and welcome! I must admit, I had to double-check if I had written your post in my sleep. I’m a brand new NS3c owner too, after 12 years of laptop gigging, mostly Komplete with Apple Mainstage. My thoughts completely echo yours on laptop. You can get amazing results but I felt a bit trapped for changing parameters on the go. For the last 4 years I expanded my rig with a Crumar Mojo clonewheel and a Behringer PolyD minimoog clone, which are wondrous “hands on” boards that opened my eyes to just how fun and dynamic live performance can be. Unfortunately, my rig was getting huge and ridiculous, and NS3c is good compromise for everything. I play in a lot of different bands from hard rock, to folk, Klezmer, and jazz, sharing a number of festivals coming up and needed one rig that I didn’t have to swap out multiple times a weekend.

I’ve been diving in and creating songs for each tune a band plays. I created a dummy template song with just Piano, Rhodes, B3 (live), and a synth lead, which is my bread and butter. Then I’m copying that a thousand times, naming them alphabetically and grouping them by band, each band gets 50 for each letter bank. It really helps to do a lot of this library work on the Nord Sound Manager, saves a ton of time! I highly recommend that for early organization. I pushed all the Factory songs to the last bank, I may explore them later, but start with my most common bands in the A and B banks.

A few tips:
- I include the Key at the end of every Song. Coming from Mainstage I cheated for years giving myself notes. I’m weening myself off, but having the starting key is really nice. Many musicians do this on printed Setlists anyway.
- I suspect for some groups I may make extensive use of the Live mode for bread & butter material. Coming from a Crumar Mojo, I’m very fast at changing basic keyboard settings on the fly, and I’m used to having them stick between patch changes, so I may dive out of the Song mode for a lot of the set, but it gives me a good starting point
- spend some time finding your favorite pianos and EPs. Make some basic defaults up front, and tweak their settings as you go. Maybe use Live mode in rehearsal as you figure out what site best in the mix, then save it to a static Program. Consider those YOUR APs and EPs and largely ignore the rest except for special occasions
- Learn to Love the Drawbars!!! I don’t know whether you have a Stage Compact or not, but even with Drawbuttons, playing B3 drawbars Live is a dream. Just make ONE B3 patch, set it to live mode, and so do your drawbar registrations on-the-fly. Excepting splits, of course. This took me some time with the Crumar Mojo, but I found it incredibly freeing! And it took much less time than I expected to become really quick at dialing in the tones I wanted. It’s just so much more fun and inspiring than presets!

[FZiegler]

There are a lot of conditions to consider. A good way of organising sounds depends a lot on the type of music you play and your role in there.

I've got a dual keyboard setup where both boards control the sounds of the NS3C - with the help of DualKB. So there are a lot of combinations I've got to put into programs. Good part of my songs have their special program - almost always only one. Another part of the songs is played by standard programs (rock piano & organ, pop piano & Rhodes, jazz Rhodes & clavinet, latin piano & marimba etc.) where I tried to neighbour different sounds from the same genre in one row (A:11..15 e.g.).

As our band has the songs numbered, I put my NS3 songs in the same order - not as programs as there is no continuous numbering, but in song mode. So, basically, on stage I'm dialing from one number to another in song mode.

[anotherscott]

Also, don't forget about the numeric pad mode, which instead of giving you single-button access to 5 sounds, gives you 2-button access to 25 sounds, which can be a better way to go.

[PupmaTz]

Amazing thanks everyone for the quick replies!

Yeah obviously depends on the genre of bands as well, i.e I play in a blues rock project with mainly piano and organ which I mostly adjust during sets but then I also have a pure synth-pop project which needs much more preparation with programs.

I like the idea of creating patches/programs and then setting up all the setlists for each project in song mode - great that you can rearrange the order of songs quickly as well if you change setlist order (so basic but couldn't even do that in Komplete Kontrol which was an absolute nightmare each gig..)

[gsbe_com]

I recently joined a band where I had to program sounds for over 70 songs. I used song mode to organize the programs I manually created and downloaded from the web.

Before I needed to organize many programs for a lot of songs, I relied on Live mode to switch between the five patches I used regularly. Now that I've got a handle on Song mode, I feel I'm getting the hang of what the NS3 can do. Based on what I've learned from this forum and elsewhere, I'm building complex patches with splits, samples, and foot control—cool (and very nerdy) stuff.

I don't like that this level of programming requires me to have the keyboard plugged into the laptop running NSM. I've found that I need the NSM application for some functions that are easier to do on the computer than on the NS3 itself. That's a bummer when I want to make quick changes during band practice...I feel certain things (like searching for samples) take way longer than I want them to. But that's the only drawback I've found so far when using the keyboard and song mode instead of controlling patch changes externally with apps like Set List Maker, Camelot Pro, iMIDIPatchBay, or MainStage. BTW - I don't have any experience with that, so this is all I know!