NS Classic/EX to NS2 Compatibility

[theshowbizkid]

Hello fellow Nord users,

I'm a touring musician and regularly have to use backline (hired) Nords. I own a Nord Stage (Revision B) and recently had to use a Nord Stage 2 at a festival. I program my own patches and use the Nord Sound Manager v5.58 (currently the latest version) to store, backup and recall my patches. However on NYE, an hour before a show in front of several thousand people, I discovered that the Nord Stage 2 would not read the same file types created/saved by my Nord Stage/Sound Manager combo. Not cool.

Anyone know of a way to save patches created on a Nord Stage (Revision B) that can be accurately recalled by a Nord Stage 2?

Your help is appreciated!

thekid.

[Hanon_CTS]

Hello theshowbizkid,
Welcome to the forums!

I believe that your Nord Stage is the Classic or Ex version, is this correct?
In the event that it is:
There really isn't a good way other than manually to covert patches between the NS2 and previous Stage models.
I'm reasonably sure that a computer script could be written that could take the sysex dump of one instrument and output a sysex file in the format of the other while padding the non-existent parameters with null values.

This would be a relatively easy thing to do for someone that owned both instruments and had some computer programming experience...
I fit the bill, except I don't own either instrument

But certainly Clavia could do this, given sufficient motivation.
This could even be a functionality added in the next Nord Sound Manager update.

Cheers, Hanon

[theshowbizkid]

Hey Hanon,

Thanks for your response. Yes, I own the Classic. As you suggest, I would have thought that it would be a fairly simple and reasonable function the Sound Manager would be capable of...

[reedmnweep]

Hey Hanon,

Thanks for your response. Yes, I own the Classic. As you suggest, I would have thought that it would be a fairly simple and reasonable function the Sound Manager would be capable of...

I completely agree, and not overly difficult either.
It's reasonable that users would upgrade from their Classic and Ex models and want to use the same patches that they'd spent many hours perfecting.

The manual way that I made reference to is writing down the settings of the previous instrument and entering the the same parameters (where applicable) on the new instrument. This is made difficult by the fact that you can't determine the value of a parameter on the NSC without moving a knob or doing a single patch sysex dump and extracting the values.

Cheers, Hanon

[theshowbizkid]

Hey Hanon,

Thanks for your response. Yes, I own the Classic. As you suggest, I would have thought that it would be a fairly simple and reasonable function the Sound Manager would be capable of...

I completely agree, and not overly difficult either.
It's reasonable that users would upgrade from their Classic and Ex models and want to use the same patches that they'd spent many hours perfecting.

The manual way that I made reference to is writing down the settings of the previous instrument and entering the the same parameters (where applicable) on the new instrument. This is made difficult by the fact that you can't determine the value of a parameter on the NSC without moving a knob or doing a single patch sysex dump and extracting the values.

Cheers, Hanon

I had the same problem since I had to port some patches from my NSC to my new NS2; to extract the parameters I used the NS C/EX editor based on CTRL published on this forum to get and visualize all Programs parameters in a single operation and save them (in the CTRL database) so I can retrieve them and manually recreate on NS2 when needed.

For Piano and Organ section conversion is straightforward, the challenge is with the synth that (as discussed in other threads) has a different sound and structure, so it requires some more work.

[theshowbizkid]

Hey maxpiano,

Thanks for your response! That sounds like a work-able solution... I'll look into it.

Cheers!

thekid

[theshowbizkid]

I contacted my national Nord dealer in regards to this issue. He in turn contacted Nord and gave me their response:

(From Clavia):

"There is nothing we can do about this. The formats are not compatible, since the Stage 2 has a totally different design, especially in the synth department."

So, I guess the summary is that the NS Classic/EX is not, and will never be, compatible with the NS2. Case closed.