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Many peo­ple have writ­ten about how awe­some the TouchOSC appli­ca­tion is for iPhone/iPod Touch, and I also agree. I’ve been hav­ing tons of fun with it on my iPod in com­bi­na­tion with Max/Msp cre­at­ing lit­tle cus­tom con­trol apps for var­i­ous projects.

Get TouchOSC Here

One of the geeky fun things that I did was cre­ate MAX patch that allows me to con­trol the Hammond Organ draw­bar set­tings on my Nord Electro 2 via my iPod Touch. Of course, the but­tons that con­trol the draw­bars work well enough, but I thought it would be nice to be able to see all of the set­tings for both the upper and lower draw­bars at the same time — and be able to manip­u­late them both simutaneously!

• There are still some issues with this setup, and I’ll explain them in this post, but it works well enough for me to enjoy as is.
• You can down­load my MAX patch on the Downloads Page. Feel free to use it and/or mod­ify it all you like. I have posted it in .max­pat for­mat and in .mxf for­mat so that wont need to have to buy the full Max/Msp soft­ware in order to use it. If you don’t have MAX, and want to use the .mxf file you will have to down­load the MAX run­time envi­ron­ment which is free to down­load here.
• Technically, I believe the .mxf file should work on both win­dows and mac, but I have only tested it on mac.

In order to setup every­thing prop­erly you will need to have both the MIDI-IN and MIDI-OUT of the NE2 con­nected to your com­puter. You will also have to con­fig­ure the set­tings for the TouchOSC appli­ca­tion to talk to your com­puter over a net­work. TouchOSC comes with excel­lent instruc­tions on how to do this. After that, open up the patch that I made and con­fig­ure the set­tings there and you should be up and running.

When you run the patch you will see a screen that looks like this.

• First, look on the Network page of the TouchOSC appli­ca­tion and put the num­ber from the Local IP address box into the iPhone ip box on my patch.
• Insert the Port(outgoing) num­ber into the reciev­ing port box in my patch, and the Port(incoming) num­ber into the send­ing port box.
• Then, dou­ble click midiin and select the name of what­ever device you are using to con­nect your NE2 to your computer.
• Do the same with mid­i­out as well, and that should be it.

There is also some basic midi infor­ma­tion that is dis­played and you can click on the lower and upper draw­bar bub­bles to see a sim­ple dis­play, how­ever I spent absolutely no time on how this appli­ca­tion looks since it mainly func­tions as the “glue” that holds every­thing together. The real fun is in using TouchOSC to con­trol your keyboard’s settings.

Using the Mix 16 Layout on the Touch OSC appli­ca­tion as a dig­i­tal con­roller for the Nord’s LED draw­bars, the first and most obvi­ous prob­lem is that there are 9 draw­bars and only 8 faders on the Mix 16 lay­out. The first 3 pages of the Mix 16 lay­out look like this

*The fourth page is a bunch of mul­ti­faders that I am not using for this patch*

On pages 1 and 2, what I did as a workaround for not hav­ing enough faders was to make the three ver­ti­cal faders on the first page con­trol the (16′) (5 1/3′) and the (8′) upper draw­bars. Once you switch over to page 2 you have con­trol of the (5 1/3′) through the (1′) draw­bars. For me this cre­ated the least amount of awkwardness.

Page 3 con­trols the lower draw­bars. What I did here was dif­fer­ent. The faders on Page 3 con­trol the (16′) through the (1 1/3′) draw­bars, then if you want to manip­u­late the (1′) draw­bar you press the tog­gle but­ton under­neath the  fader con­trol­ling the (1 1/3′) draw­bar (the fader fur­thest to the right) and now it con­trols the (1′).

This setup for the lower draw­bars made the most sense for me because I usu­ally like to use the Split fea­ture so that I can have a more “bassy” sounds on the lower end of the key­board. This isn’t always the case, but again it seemed the most nat­ural way to deal with only hav­ing 8 faders.

When you move the faders on your iPhone/iPod touch you will see it reflected on the draw­bar LEDs, and also, when you move the LEDs on your Nord you will see it on your iPhone/iPod touch.

To me this would be kind of use­less by itself, but what I like to do is have my iPod on Page 3 so I can see the lower draw­bar set­tings while the Nord itself is show­ing the upper draw­bars. That way I see every­thing and con­trol both at the same time.

Also, I could not fig­ure out how to make the set­tings on TouchOSC change auto­mat­i­cally when I switched from one pro­gram set­ting to the next. For instance, If you switch from pro­gram C8 to C7 you need to do a quick MIDI “dump” so that TouchOSC can dis­play your cur­rent draw­bar settings.

It sounds a lit­tle com­pli­cated, but it’s pretty easy. Press SHIFT + LEFT OCTAVE SHIFT (DUMP), make sure that the Nord Display says ‘Ct’, and hit the red store but­ton. You will see the TouchOSC appli­ca­tion update itself with your draw­bar set­tings. Once you have set the type of MIDI dump that you want to ‘Ct’ it will remain that way when you access the func­tion again. This makes it easy to hit SHIFT-DUMP-STORE really quickly when you want to change programs.

Feedback

Again, feel free to down­load and use as you see fit. Please leave com­ments and/or email me here with any of your sug­ges­tions. I cre­ated this patch a few months ago for my own use and I’d like to add some more fea­tures to it if I can find the time.

As I was writ­ing this, it occurred to me that I might be able to use one of the tog­gle but­tons to send a mes­sage to the NE2 to trig­ger a MIDI dump and update the draw­bar set­tings. Also, if I routed the audio through MAX I could add dif­fer­ent effects and maybe use the XY Pad and muti­faders for some­thing too.

Since cre­at­ing this patch I real­ized that Nord has come out with an Electro 3, which seems to be a mas­sive improve­ment, essen­tially solv­ing many of the prob­lems I have with the Electro 2. The Electro 3 now includes reverb, which I always wanted, and also the abil­ity to edit and upload cus­tom sounds, which I also really wanted. I am now highly jeal­ous of all Electro 3 own­ers. If you are an Electro 3 owner and want to try out this patch, please let me know if it works. Have fun!

Tags: Max/Msp, MIDI, Nord Electro 2, TouchOSC