Jibbesander wrote:Heh, turned on my mac today and it worked!
Did the exact same thing as yesterday!
Erm, weird - oh well, let's not complain it's working
Jibbesander wrote:But i have another question:
If i want to use my NR3 on two or more different tracks(bass, lead, pad) how do i do that?
You can set up your NR3 in such a way that different slots listen to different MIDI channels. For example, you could set slots 1-3 to the same MIDI channel (using a detuned version of the same sound) for the lead and set slot 4 to a different channel for the bass line. If you then send MIDI to the first channel, slots 1-3 will play (regardless of whether they're enabled on the front panel) just as only slot 4 will play if you send MIDI to the second channel. For bonus points, you can setup the NR3 to route the sound of slots 1-3 to outputs 1+2 and set up slot 4 to send the output to outputs 3+4. If you then connect the NR3 to your Scarlett using all four outputs, the lead and the bass sound would be available in Live on completely separate channels.
Btw. I had a regular Nord Lead 2X and I'm extrapolating from what that can do to your NR3. Hopefully I won't make any big mistakes
Jibbesander wrote:If i do that everything plays when i hit play.
Most likely this is caused because all slots are listening on the same MIDI channel.
Jibbesander wrote:Lets say i have a bassline on 0:40 that starts 0:00.
What do you mean exactly here?
Jibbesander wrote:I've never used hardware, just vst.
So im sorry if this is obvious.
Provided you send the audio back into Live, a real instrument works pretty much like a VST. There is one important difference though.
In the case of a VST, Live knows exactly how long it takes a VST instrument to start making a sound once it receives a MIDI command (we could call this 'latency', though it is not entirely correct). Suppose it takes a VST 1 millisecond (ms) to respond. If you then play back some MIDI data in Live, it will actually send that MIDI note
1 ms before you want the sound to start, so the sound actually starts at exactly the right time. Pretty much all DAWs do this automatically.
With a real (external) instrument this is more complex. If you want your NR3 to make a sound, Live needs to send a MIDI note to the NR3 (it takes the MIDI controller in your Scarlett a moment to respond), then the NR3 itself takes a moment to respond and then the NR3 sends audio via your Scarlett into Live (which also takes a moment).
The driver for your audio interface reports to Live how much latency it adds (how long it takes for a sound that appeared on an input to be available to Live) and on decent interfaces (and Focusrite is a decent brand) the reported value is pretty accurate (the value changes when you change recording settings for your interface). I don't know if MIDI drivers actually report the latency they add, but let's assume they do. Live will automatically try to compensate for the latency added by the audio interface and by the MIDI interface. However, it has no idea how much latency the NR3 itself adds (how long it takes to respond to a MIDI note).
Small amounts of latency (say 3-8 ms) are no problem and you generally automatically compensate for it by hitting keys slightly earlier, but with more latency (say 10-30 ms) you will definitely start to notice it and it may even become unplayable.
Imagine this:
- Hit a key on an external MIDI keyboard
- Send the MIDI note-on message to the Scarlett's MIDI port
- Send the received MIDI message from the Scarlett via USB to the driver on your Mac
- Send the MIDI message from the driver to Live
- Find out Live needs to send it back out again over some MIDI channel to the NR3
- Send the MIDI note-on message from Live to the driver
- Send the MIDI message from the driver via USB to the Scarlett
- Send the MIDI message over the MIDI cable to the NR3
- Start making a sound on the NR3
- Send the generated audio out via the outputs to the Scarlett
- Send the recorded audio via USB to the driver on the Mac
- Send the audio from the driver to Live
- Find out Live needs to send it to the outputs on the Scarlett (which have speakers connected to them)
- Send the audio from Live to the driver
- Send the audio from the driver via USB to the Scarlett
- Send the audio out the analog outputs on the Scarlett
Even if every step only requires a fraction of a millisecond, it quickly adds up. In the above situation (playing the NR3 via an external MIDI keyboard) you will definitely have an annoying delay between hitting a key and hearing it via the speakers. The most obvious solution is to plug a headphone into the NR3, or to plug the outputs of the NR3 into a mixer (and then into the Scarlett) and to listen to the monitoring output of that mixer. On playback, Live will be able to compensate for all this latency (if set up correctly).
I like to complicate things by dragging up all kinds of somewhat relevant information.
In practice, you might not even need to mess with latency compensation settings in Live, but be aware you can. There's a tutorial in the Live documentation that describes how to measure latency in a setup like this and how to compensate for it.
