TouchOsc Control for the Nord Electro (updated)

Now that the TouchOSC editor has arrived the first thing I did was sit down and create a more appropriate layout for the drawbar control application I made for my Nord Electro 2.

Download the .maxpat version here.

or the Runtime version here.

You can view the original post here if you want.

What’s New?

As you can see in the picture, the layout now has 9 faders to match each of the Nord Electro Drawbars. I also inverted the direction of the sliders to match the direction of the Drawbar LEDs.

There are two pages, the first page (green) controls the upper drawbars, and the second page (red) controls the lower drawbars. The custom GUI now makes it less confusing with no funny workarounds for only having 8 faders.

Setup

In order to setup everything properly you will need to have both the MIDI-IN and MIDI-OUT of the Nord Electro 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 Nord Electro 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, 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 the drawbar settings.

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.

Electro 3 Users

I created this to work with my Electro 2, but according to the Electro 3 manual the MIDI Control numbers for the LED drawbars are the same as the Electro 2. Technically, this means that everything should work the same on an Electro 3, but I haven’t tested it on an Electro 3.

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Get TouchOSC Here

July 6, 2009

Posted in Max/Msp/Jitter and tagged Drawbars, Max/Msp, MIDI, Nord Electro 2, Nord Electro 3, TouchOSC.