Nord User Forum

Was never heavy into sampling but this new editor makes it so easy. I sampled some sounds off my PC3 with varying results. Picture of Nectar is making a great lower split on organ. I chose every C and G, but had difficulty hitting the keys at same velocity and some controlling after touch Also I tried recording right below clipping, but finished with the sound not nearly as loud as Nord samples. Was thinking maybe to record in Midi first, and drawing/editing velocity, or just plain type it all out manually in the DAW. Volume issue, maybe normalize the wave file before saving? Any help to make these better is appreciated.

Ytreval1 wrote:Was thinking maybe to record in Midi first, and drawing/editing velocity, or just plain type it all out manually in the DAW. Volume issue, maybe normalize the wave file before saving? Any help to make these better is appreciated.

For sure sending edited MIDI notes/velocity is the best way to ensure the samples layer will be consistent; with regards to normalization, OK if you really need it (best would be to optimize sampling level, rather) but if you do it then you should normalize all samples together, as a single wav (otherwise you would lose any original volume difference between them).

I record the instruments/samples with a fixed velocity. I use for this cubase AI.

The sampling can be automated via MIDI, which will also maintain consistency. Available tools include:

Autosampler (part of Mainstage) - Mac
SampleRobot - Mac or PC
Samplit - Mac or PC
Extreme Sample Converter - PC

I believe most have free demos (not Mainstage, but if you have a Mac, you may have that already anyway).

anotherscott wrote:The sampling can be automated via MIDI, which will also maintain consistency. Available tools include:

Autosampler (part of Mainstage) - Mac
SampleRobot - Mac or PC
Samplit - Mac or PC
Extreme Sample Converter - PC

I believe most have free demos (not Mainstage, but if you have a Mac, you may have that already anyway).

Mainstage for only 30 $ can do way more in many aspects... recommended !

I don't think Extreme Sample Converter can actually sample...you can edit and convert samples with it, set loop points etc...(will the Nord editor recognize loop points in metadata?) but if it does actually create new samples too I have not seen that feature.

I´d try to do it with normalizing. I guess the sound you mentioned is an slightly distorted organ, and with that there is no desire for any dynamics. I do something like this with the free Audacity. For a free program that is not really supposed as a sampling-tool, it has lots of interesting tools onboard, normalize is one of them.
But you know the sampled PC3 sound will never be the same, do you?

tsss27 wrote:I don't think Extreme Sample Converter can actually sample...you can edit and convert samples with it, set loop points etc......but if it does actually create new samples too I have not seen that feature.

The web site and screen shots show that it has a whole hardware sampler component, so I assume it does. I can't actually try it because I'm on a Mac. Even the docs require a PC to read!

I worked with Extreme Sample converter. I used it on a Mac with windows in virtualbox. No issues with that!

You can use it to sample a hardware and software synth with certain keydistances and velocities. I did this to get many of my favorite patches as SFZ, but also to load into my Kurzweil.
Workflow was pretty complex: ESC -> looping -> convert to SFZ using Polyphone or krz-editor. All tools had their things and if i had to redo it after a year I had to learn it all again...

For piano's the velocity is really needed to get a good result. Other sounds might be more than good enough live with only one velocity level.

I really love the simplicity of the Nord Sample editor:
Remove reverb and other effects, set velocity to fixed level. Record a wav with certain interval. Load in Sample editor and I copied a sound in 5 minutes.
Add the effects back in your Nord.

Samples are small and sounding great. I don't miss the velocity at all!

I was afraid that the Nord (Stage 3 and Wave 2) where to limited for my setups, specially because i used to work with Kurzweil (Where everything is possible). I'm able to do all i want, fully hands-on: Nice!

Good to know Extreme Sample Converter actually does this, I have it and have used it to convert between formats and extract samples from various formats into wav but never messed with its actual sampling features.