Nord User Forum

Hi! I thought I'd ask here as I wasn't sure where else to go.

I've been trying to set up my Nord Drum 3P to supply midi to my DAW, to play acoustic drum samples. I almost have it working, but I'm having issues. Specifically, notes sometimes (often, more often than not) don't activate, on the DAW end. Looking at a midi mapper, it seems that quite a lot of the time, I'll hit a pad and every note that's sent through is an OFF or an ON. As far as I can tell this means that it won't get picked up in the daw.

This happens on two operating systems, so I'm fairly sure it's not software side. Is there some setting in the Nord I'm missing to fix this? I basically just want to know if I have a broken 3P (which would be annoying, and the 2nd one to die in a different way, and I've never used midi before with this device in the years I've owned it).

Thanks for any help.

EDIT: It gets weirder. I went to a fresh patch and set all the midi settings as follows:
Lo On
GL 10
Ch 11
nt 38
PC Sr
CC Sr
SE nd
I set pitch of the oscillator/pad to 38.
I opened a midi monitor and hit the pad once. It generated, all on channel 10:
ON D1 Velocity 126
ON C-2 Velocity 4
ON E3 Velocity 16
ON E-3 Velocity 38
OFF E-2 Velocity 64
Given that the pad (and nt) were both set to 38, I have no idea how it generated those notes, and no idea why, within an absolute fraction of a second, it generated 4 ONs before an OFF.

Hitting it again generated 3 note off signals, one of E-1, one F#8, one E-2. No idea how that happened either. I'm totally lost.

Hi Zevulpn45, welcome to the forum!

That sounds confusing indeed!

- It seems that multiple pads are triggered when you're hitting a single pad, to overcome this, raise the threshold setting for the pads. Hitting the pads right in the center also helps to prevent this, maybe tilt the unit a bit more if that makes it easier.

EDIT:
- I had another look at your post, in your description I count 7 different MIDI notes after 2 consecutive strokes on your 3p, unless you changed MIDI settings in the mean time, I'd expect only 6 different MIDI notes from your 3p at max, and I don't understand the Off message(s). Therefore I was wondering if your MIDI interface could be the culprit, what MIDI interface are you using?


And just some general MIDI related explanation & suggestions:

- The note number in the MIDI menu (nt) determines the MIDI note that the pad will output via MIDI, the pitch sound parameter only determines the pitch of the drum sound on the 3p audio output, it's important to choose a different MIDI note in the MIDI menu for each of the 6 pads..

- You don't need the 'individual' MIDI channels (Ch) in this setup, you only use this functionality when you want to control the 3p's sound parameters, I think it's good practice to switch this OFF when not in use - so: set parameter Ch to value 'OF' for all 6 drum channels (pads) one by one. You could also disconnect the cable from your interface to the MIDI in of the 3p if you hadn't already. It's just to keep things as simple and tidy as possible, but I don't think it should make a difference in your current setup.


Hope it helps,
Cheers,
Albert