Nord User Forum

Valpurgis wrote:

RichardG wrote:[My mixer is on the ground so unreachable while I'm playing.
We don't have our own soundguy, so how could I possibly make myself heard with a solo if everything's already at 100%

Maybe the musical way? Use expression, volume pedal, key velocity, mutually adapt the each other, leave room for solos. If everyone is at 100% I assume you play in a punk cover band......

That would be an option but I have the 88 and am not really a pianist.
So a Synth solo would be much harder (for me) to play and organ has no key-velocity..

Also I'd like to carry less instead of more (pedal).

Your assumption is fairly close, I play Ska

I think the 0db at 100% is old school thinking. Modern mixing boards and I/O devices do not need anywhere near that much signal.

I was always taught to send as much signal to the board as possible back in the day when S/N ratio was the rallying cry. Digital equipment and modern D/A conversion has very little noise, therefor you don't need anywhere near as much signal to still have a good S/N ratio. Additionally, digital boards can add gain on the back end without adding distortion.

I challenge any of you to tell the difference between the volume at 50% or 100% when turned up to the same end-game loudness SPL.

Yet anyone with a tin ear can hear clipping at the input (the OP is clearly hearing it).

In my studio when recording keyboards I don't like to come anywhere close to clipping, ESPECIALLY with pianos (huge dynamic transients and highs that distort in an ugly way when clipping occurs).

Plus, I've been at it a long time, and I rarely (like never) find soundmen or musicians who aren't louder at the end of a gig than they were at the beginning. Everyone knows, the faders go North they never go South. (patiently awaiting the response of "...I never do that" Sorry, don't believe you.)

So in response to the OP, if it sounds too hot, it's probably too hot. Don't worry about turning it down at the source and then boosting it on the back end.

Valpurgis wrote:

RichardG wrote:[My mixer is on the ground so unreachable while I'm playing.
We don't have our own soundguy, so how could I possibly make myself heard with a solo if everything's already at 100%

Maybe the musical way? Use expression, volume pedal, key velocity, mutually adapt the each other, leave room for solos. If everyone is at 100% I assume you play in a punk cover band......

Pretty snarky response I think. In your very first sentence you insinuate that he's not a musician? then you follow up that everyone shouldn't be at 100% when the argument he was making was that everyone shouldn't be at 100% all the time.

I mean if he has a volume pedal with gain available then he's not really at 100% now is he. You think that key velocity will get you over the band mix??? What if you're playing an organ patch?

But you're saying that you should be able to run at 100% and still have some kind of room for a solo...?

There's enough technique band mixes and solos to fill a book or two, but I'm pretty sure most of those chapters include the soloist getting louder.

I think Richard G's posts have been right on in this thread. No idea why you're shrimp-forking him.

“Shrimp-forking”! Awesome turn of phrase - thanks for that!

Hi

You made my day quoting Nigel T. on this topic!


Where is he now?

This whole discussion reminds me of two sound engineers I used to work with. They would often take turns at the same console (usually not changing during a gig, though). One insisted that all faders should be around 0 dB in "normal reference song" position, and thus worked the input gain to achieve this. The other equally strongly defended his position that all levels hitting the mix bus should have similar, thus working the input gains to make each channel peak around 0 dB before summation. Neither really understood that there could be alternatives to his own way of setting it up, so if the same band would be handled by "the other guy" a lot of time was needed to re-balance everything. Not an optimal solution for either, nor for the band. Even worse if one had to take over from the other...

But both were able to make the band sound nice.

This discussion is possibly a bit similar. However you set it up is fine as long as it achieves your needs. Of course informed decisions are good, so it helps to understand how it works, including that the two gain stages are different, there is plenty of headroom on the summation bus (I've never noticed any digital internal clipping), digital faders are not actually amplifying but attenuate the signal (0 dB is max and everything else is negative), you don't always need to send at max level to the FOH, etc.

Anyway, there was a challenge above to demonstrate an discernible difference between two setups based at 100% and 50% (which is actually -12 dB) respectively. I think that is not so easy to do; both setups can work. But it is not an argument that one setup is necessarily better than the other.

Maybe a similar challenge would be to come up with a (musically useful) program that has all faders at 100% and show signs of unintended digital clipping internal to the NS3. It may be lack of skills, but I haven't been able to myself -- which is why I doubt that internal clipping in the board would be what the OP is experiencing.

mistral_73 wrote:Where is he now?

Probably facepalming somewhere...

I’ve never cared. If I hear it clip in the monitors, I turn it down during soundcheck. If the FoH Guy is happy, alll is well. If he tells me to turn it up or down, i do. Or switch the “pad” on the DI boxes.

Yikes, this thread blew up. At home in the studio, the NS3 sits atop the MP11 and both are routed into a cheap mixer, which has everything set to nominal 0. I kept the master vol on the Nord at roughly 50% and the volume on the Kawai at 50% also. My monitors are at 75% gain each. I've noticed that the Nord sounds better with the Section volumes turned down and the master volume turned up, rather than the other way around and was trying to get some insight on this.

Fallboard wrote:I've noticed that the Nord sounds better with the Section volumes turned down and the master volume turned up, rather than the other way around and was trying to get some insight on this.

That is really puzzling; I'm quite confident that the internal summation is done digitally, so there is no good technical reason that I can think of that would improve the sound as you lower the section volumes. If anything, the there could be a small improvement the other way round.

If your cheap mixer is not up to it, there could possibly be too much inter-modulation that reduces the sound quality. So if you have a really "digitally clean" signal from the Nord, there could possibly be more inter-modulation, compared to a slightly more compressed output from the Nord which you may get with a higher analog gain. But it's just about the only idea I can come up with at this point.