I understand what you mean. And I knew that alternate approach would not work for everyone, I even listed its limitations... there's no way to completely emulate song mode on an NS4. Likewise, there's no way to completely emulate the NS4's patch navigation advantages on the NS3, so there will always be some trade-offs whichever way you go.cooltour wrote: ↑30 Aug 2025, 10:51 Of course I know these options, but they don't help me ... I play in different tribute bands and have occupied a bank with max. 50 songs in song mode for each setlist (1 Beatles, 2 Queen, 3 Dire Straits, 4 Police/Sting, 5 U2).
I have 5 5 programs available for each song, so it is perfect. If I consider how often I have placed the piano from the A11 program in the song mode in the right places ... that would not work with your method. Do you understand what I mean?
That said, if you'd really love a way to use an NS4, if only you could find a way to come closer to that NS3 Song Mode functionality, I think you may be able to get closer than you think. Here's a possible workaround that might work for you, or if not, at least might work for some others in similar situations.
One of your issues is capacity... you've got 5 sets of up to 50 songs with up to 5 sounds each (basically, up to 250 "pages" of sounds in total) and you can't fit that all in the NS4 at once. However, you don't need more than one of those sets at any given gig. So let's try this:
The NS4 has 64 pages for Programs. Let's use 50 pages for your tribute band usage. (I'm assuming that, in those tribute band gigs, you don't need to call on any sounds other than the ones in your song mode set list for the gig, but just in case you do, this approach will still leave you with 14 free pages, enough to store an extra 112 programs for general/emergency/other uses, beyond what you need for a given tribute gig. Plus you've still got all your piano, organ, and synth Preset Library sounds, for access to additional sounds if needed, something NS3 didn't have.)
Dedicate each of the 50 "tribute band" pages to one song, say, for the Beatles tribute (presumably via Nord Sound Manager, where it will be less tedious than doing it on the keyboard). Put the first sound for each song in the first location for a given page, and name it with the name of the song. (I'd suggest preceding the song title with a space, I'll get back to that.) Just as you do with Song Mode, put the second sound in the second location and so on, leaving any unneeded locations empty (since not every song needs so many different sounds). Save that set on your computer, and then do the same for each of your other tributes. You now have 5 master sets stored on your computer. Before each tribute gig that is different from the previous, load the set for that particular tribute.
Yes, the setup for the gigs is more complicated, you can't just turn the board on after a Beatles gig and say "Now I want my Queen set," you'd have to connect to Nord Stage Manager and replace you Beatles set with your Queen set. But once you're AT the gig, I think it would basically work just like Song Mode works on your NS3. I think better, actually, because if you wanted, a song could now have a max of 8 individually button-selectable sound instead of 5... plus, you can set the display so that it gives you the names of all 8 sounds that are currently under the 8 buttons. And it's still a simple matter to navigate from each song to the next (single button). So from a performance perspective, this could give you what you want and more... but it requires a few minutes attached to your computer before you leave for the gig. (Restoring an alternate set won't take long, since you're not changing sample data.)
If, at the gig, you suddenly need to get to a sound out of the original order, you don't have to scroll through your 50 pages to find it. Use the display that lists the programs in alphabetical order. And if you started each song title with a space, all your songs will be listed right at the top, instead of mixed in with all the secondary patch sounds.
Yes, you may have used what is currently your A11 piano in 100 different locations, but that might not matter. It is no more work to put a copy of that piano sound into another location on the NS4 than it was to put a pointer to that sound into another location on the NS3. The one drawback here is, if you want to globally change all instances of that piano sound in every song in every one of your 5 tribute band song lists, you can no longer change it just once, you'd have to locate and replace each instance of the old version with your new version. If you do this kind of thing a lot, that could be could be a significant loss. If you hardly ever do it, it might not be a big deal.
One other possible drawback is that, if you need to re-order the songs, re-ordering pages-of-8 in Nord Sound Manager, while not bad, is not as neat as NS3's on-board ability to re-order its pages-of-5, from what I can tell.
In the end, overall, I think this approach could give you something better than what you have during the performance, but would require a small amount of additional prep time ahead of the performance.
