Loading Artist Presets Individually?

[lil lat lat]

The Nord Stage 4 is a versatile tool, especially with studio enhancing. Is there a way to select specific presets to download from an artists signature pack?

[Gambold]

Yes, but it's not obvious. Here are instructions for PC. I'm not sure about Mac.

1) Make sure you can view file extensions on your PC. You may need to go to Windows - System - File Explorer and turn this on.

2) Click the downloaded bundle file name and change the extension (the letters AFTER the dot in the name) to zip. Agree to the warning.

3) Right click and extract the zip file into a folder.

4) Open this folder - the individual presets will be in a sub-folder called Program - Bank.

5) Use the Sound Manager to load the individual presets from that location.

NOTE: Presets require specific piano and/or sample files to also be loaded. Sound Manager will tell you if these are missing on your Nord when you load an individual preset. You can then load those as needed.

As you can see, this is a lot of work. A faster way is let Sound Manager load all of them into a Bank, and then delete the ones you don't want from there. The downside to that is Bundles will load a lot of pianos and samples that you may never want or use...and if memory is precious you will need to remove those.

[Gambold]

A coda about Bundle presets - these are put together by Nord artists and along with various particular sound and EQ settings, they usually associate a particular piano and/or sample to go with them.

You almost always need that particular sample for the preset to sound right. But I've found that artists might pick a piano I don't have loaded, and if space is tight, I can use another piano I already have loaded.

For instance, an artist may build a preset using a piano you may not have loaded, like the Grand Lady D or the Royal Grand. Your already-loaded White Grand will do just as well if you don't have the room to add more pianos. You can link to an existing piano once the preset is loaded, in Sample Manager.