Splitting the keyboard on a Nord Wave

[Mayhew]

Hi there,

Apologies if this discussion has been covered elsewhere, I couldn't see it. I'm currently weighing up whether to buy a Nord Wave. I'm in love with the thing, but for playing live I need to be able to do bass with my left hand, Ray Manzarek-style, and the Wave doesn't have a keyboard split function, which is a problem since I might want, say, a punchy bass guitar sound for the bottom octave and a half, and a flutey mellotron sound for the rest.

Since the Wave has two slots I understand that I could hook up a MIDI controller keyboard to acheive a similar function. However, this seems like a bit of a faf, so I'm also wondering whether, since you can load in your own sounds, it's possible to load individual samples for each key, so, for the program for this particular song, say, I'd assign bass guitar notes for the first octave and a half, and then my mellotron sounds for the rest, so in effect I'd have a split keyboard incorporated into one patch.

Has anybody who owns a Nord Wave done this, or the MIDI controller option? Are they possible? How practical are they?

By the way, I know that the Nord Stage has the split function, but I'd be paying the extra £600/700 purely for that, (since the Wave is quite fancy enough for me in all other respects) which seems a bit dumb.

Cheers for reading,

Chris

[Wout Blommers]

Mayhew

I don't owe a Wave, but I know it's possible
Maybe the Electro3 is a better option?

Wout

[jamesb]

I've used the external midi controller option and it works well.

You're right, you can also make a sample program that maps different sounds across the keyboard, so you could achieve a split that way (but of course, the filter, envelopes and everything else will be common to all notes across the keyboard).

[anotherscott]

Yes, the Nord Wave has two slots into which you could load, to use your example, a bass guitar patch and a mellotron flute patch, and you're absolutely correct, you can't split them on the internal keyboard, you would have to trigger one of them from an external keyboard set to another MIDI channel. Yes, I've done it, and it works, and with only a 4-octave keyboard, it's often better than doing an internal split anyway, but yes, there are times an internal split could be sufficient, and it's frustrating that Nord doesn't support it.

To me, the other problem is that you can't send each slot's sound out its own output. So you can't assign the bass to the Left output and the flutes to the Right, either with any kind of slot-routing, or with panning of individual saved sounds (the only pan function creates constant motion, you can't lock a sound to one side or the other). This means that it's a little more complicated than necessary to do something like adjusting the volume of the bass without altering the volume of the flutes, and it also means you can't send the sound man a separate feed for the bass, or run it to its own outboard processing, etc. So yes, it works, and yes, there are what seem like entirely unnecessary limitations.

An alternate solution, as you described, would be to create a single loadable sample sound that has an internal split between bass and flute, for example. That should work fine, and I *think* you can use stereo sample placement so that the bass will come out the left output and the flute will come out the right if you care about that as I do. This is, in fact, something I've been meaning to experiment with myself. The limitation is that you will unnecessarily be using up lots of sample RAM. I mean, let's say you want 4 patches: bass and flutes, bass and brass, bass and strings, bass and organ. You're going to frustratingly put the same identical bass sounds into 4 sets of samples, meaning they are going to take up 4x the memory as they would if you could just call up a bass patch on the bottom part of the keyboard. And if you also want those flute/brass/string/organ sounds available over the full keyboard in alternate patches, that's still more duplicate samples in RAM. And it's also going to take a bunch of work to set it all up. But... it should work. Of course, this then only works with sample based sounds. It won't let you create a split between bass guitar and a Wave-generated synth sound. It also doesn't let you do anything "on the fly" -- all your splits have to be thought out, set up, and loaded in in advance.

There is a third possible solution (if you don't need to route the different sounds to different outputs). As in the first approach, assign each slot to a different MIDI channel. Set the keyboard to "Local Off" and route the MIDI output to something like the MIDI Solutions Event Processor. Have the processor send everything below a certain key to one MIDI channel, everything above to another, and send the output of the processor back into the Wave's MIDI input. Bingo... that should give you your split keyboard.

Yes, the Nord Stage has a split function, but apart from the alternate pianos, it doesn't load samples (yours or theirs). And it's synth capability is weaker than the Wave's. And it could not do the precise function you're asking about in your example, bass guitar sound on the left of the split and mellotron flutes to the right, since it has neither bass guitar nor mellotron flute sounds, nor any way to add them.

As for the Nord Electro option, it doesn't do splits at all, except between two organ sounds. The only advantage it has over the Wave in this scenario is that, if you do a sample-based internal split, you have 5 octaves to platy with instead of 4. But it is not bi-timbral, so the other options discussed disappear, and it has a lot less available sample RAM which will probably more than negate having the extra keys to assign samples to. Other than that, you'd be losing all the synthesis capabilities, aftertouch, mod wheel, and pitch bend in order to pick up the pianos and organs, which don't seem to be what you're after.

The Wave can be frustrating in what seem like odd limitations, but for the things it does, there's still probably nothing better.

[jamesb]

It'd be cool if there was a morph mode that did a 'hard morph' instead of a 'continuous morph'. That way, we could split sounds across the keyboard, and could also do typical velocity switching using the patch in panel A for soft and panel B for hard velocities.

[Mayhew]

Thanks very much for the replies, thanks for the extensive info anotherscott; very helpful.

jamesb raises the problem that in creating a single split sample your filter, envelopes, effects etc will be common across all the keyboard (so the settings that you want for your treble sound may be wildly inappropriate for the simple and solid bass sound you need. anotherscott raises the problem that you can't adjust the volume of the two different sounds within the one patch relative to each other.

Do you know if these problems could be tackled by creating a patch with the first octave and a half bass samples, and the rest silent, and a patch with the first octave and a half silent, and the rest flute samples, putting one on each slot, and playing with both slots layered? That way maybe you could determine seperate effects and filters for each patch, and, if you know that, for example, the flute is going to tend to need to be a bit louder than the bass, edit in more volume for the flute? (Not as ideal as sending them seperately to the sound guy, obviously, but something, at least.)

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding simple things about the Wave- obviously I don't have one here to check, I'm just trying to avoid coughing up the money and then finding that it presents me with serious limitations.

Cheers,

Chris

[anotherscott]