Piano/B3 layer patch

[thruxman7]

New guy here. Loving my new Electro 3 but I am curious if anyone has developed a decent sounding upright piano/B3 layered patch. I understand the limitations of the NE3 etc. but I thought I'd ask anyway if someone had a solid workaround. Basically I'm looking for a thick B3 (a la 60A patch that comes default with the NE3) combined with a punchy upright piano that can give it a little oomph in the bass. Thoughts/help or am I just SOL short of forking over the dough for a Stage 2? Thanks a lot!

[DanielD71]

Hi thruxman, if you have a daw program and the nord sample editor, you could resample your NE3 sounds and export the layer note by note and import it back again in your NE3.

My way of doing it would be to create a midi track playing 2 bar notes starting from C1 working up by 3 or 4 semitones steps.
Switch of all effects on the NE3.
Then record your piano sound note by note (using the sweet spot velocity) triggered by the midi track in your daw.
Use the same midi track for your organ sound (velocity not an issue) .. effects are tricky, since the lesly afterwards would be apllied on the piano also .. so anticipate on that while sampling.
Export the combined wave files note by note (leaving a short gap at the begin for the attack) .. name the files e.g. 'pianoogan_c1" etc
Import into the nord sample editor (the manual is actually a great tutorial for that).

Save your daw project as a template for future use .. stack vsti's and other hardware, great fun!

I could make a tutorial movie of this, I'm using cubase with channel batch export .. but I remember somebody already did something similar on youtube. If you have troubles, let us know and I'll try to give you some tips to make things work.

There is a lot of gratification when you make your own custom sounds, and the nice ones you can share here ofcourse!

take care and good luck!

Mayby you should create a split layer so you can ooompf your piano bass (some eq in the right spot can do miracles for that ..)

[thruxman7]

Cool deal thanks! I do have a DAW. I'm working off Reaper. In fact the whole reason why I would like this patch is because in my band, I've been using a midi controller/laptop to trigger organ and piano sounds. Now that I have a NE3, I can move away from using the laptop live except for one of our songs needs that piano/organ layer. Your instructions are helpful and make sense for the most part but what do you mean by "2 bar notes"? Also not sure what you mean by "Sweet spot velocity" but I've literally owned my NE3 for less than a day so I still haven't read through the manual or hardly explored it at all. Lots to learn!

[chielio72]

2 bar notes, I'm sorry .. I just mean notes that are long enough for the release to fade out of the piano .. in this case when you layer the sounds my guess is that a loop won't work.
With the sweet spot I mean that you sample the Piano notes with a fixed velocity level (not to soft not too hard) where the piano sound at its best for your arrangement/song.

Good luck! If you run into problems let us know, hope it works out for you!

You can also play your parts first and then analyse the velocity range of your midi data .. you dont want ppp to sound fff and visa versa since the multilayer of the piano get lost in the process.

[thruxman7]

Right, makes sense. And when I sample both the piano and the organ, moving up the length of the keyboard in increments of 3-4 semitones should render a decent sample? Also, (last question for now), when you get to the editor, for what I'm trying to do, what would you recommend selecting by way of Amplitude, Filter, Attack Time, Decay/Release Time?

[bdodds]

When I sampled my Rhodes pianos I was surprised at how small the sample was even with sampling every note.. For something like a piano I'd sample every note, changing the pitch of something like a piano sounds really obvious, and it shouldn't take up too much space..

the one down side to the organ sample is that you won't have the phenomenon of loudness robbing, so going from single notes to chords will result in possibly a noticeable difference in volume..