Nord Question

[Chummy]

Hey,

 

I am looking to replace or add to my digital organ and buy a synth.

 

Now, I am looking for something that can also serve as a MIDI keyboard for my Cubase, Also something that can recreate vintage early-mid 80s sounds

Like Junos Jupiters Moogs and DX7s. Lastly, I am studying music production at college and as a keyboardist would like my first "real" synth and get into synthesis even more.

 

Now I've been looking and found this Nord lead 4, My questions are:

 

1) Can you get to retro sounds with it? or should I go with a different synth. Because I am really into those 80s sounds.

 

2) I do have VSTs in Cubase, but I would like to be able to record my performance as MIDI directly from the synth. bypassing the "VST" (example: Hey I just created that cool resobass on the nord and would like to record it into Cubase track as an Instrument channel with MIDI notes and NOT in Audio).

 

Or again, should I go with a different board? any suggestions or comments from this specific synth users? or any synth that would fit my needs (spit it out don't be shy XD)

 

[JeffLearman]

I haven't heard a Nord Lead so I can't answer #1.

 

Regarding #2, you can do that with any MIDI keyboard and any decent DAW. It works just as you say: you add a blank MIDI track and set it to record the MIDI from your keyboard. You select the sound on the keyboard you want, simply so you know what you're doing will sound like (if you play it back using that same patch, which you don't have to do.)

 

When you're done recording, you'll have a MIDI track. I recommend you record audio too, on another track, so that you can fiddle with mixing and listen to what you played without having to have the keyboard connected. (You may need to mute the MIDI track to keep from hearing both the audio recorded track and the live keyboard at the same time.)

 

If you then edit the MIDI track, the recorded audio track will be out-of-date, so just delete it. You'll have to re-render the audio track, by playing the MIDI track into the keyboard while recording the keyboard's audio output, onto an audio track.

 

Some DAWs have ways to keep the MIDI and the associated audio "together" into a bundled "midi+audio" track, or a "frozen MIDI track" or "rendered MIDI track". That's a nice feature, but unnecessary; it just keeps you from having to remember that audio track Y is the audio for midi track X, and good track labeling should handle that. No doubt there are other benefits, but it's probably best to start out just using separate tracks so you know what's really going on, and then later see if your DAW has features to make the process smoother.

 

The advantage to a VST instrument is that if you edit the MIDI, you can just play it back, without any keyboard connected. Also, you can convert the MIDI to audio "offline" -- that is, faster than real-time. With an external MIDI sound source, any time you need to re-render the audio version, it takes the full time of the song. That is, if it's a 5 minute song, you have to wait 5 minutes to re-render the audio for the new MIDI data. If you have a lot of MIDI tracks, that can get time-consuming. (You generally want to do each track individually so you end up with individual audio tracks for each instrument. Of course, if the keyboard is multi-timbral and can play all the voices at once, you can do them all at once, but then you lose the ability to put audio effects on just one track.)

 

And as you can see, if you want to put an audio effect on a MIDI track, you have to put it on the rendered-audio "companion" track.

 

All that is enough hassle that I created soundfonts from the hardware-keyboard patches that I use the most, just so I don't need my hardware keyboards wired up to do anything other than recording the MIDI in the first place.

[Chummy]

thanks for the thorough answer. Though I still really hope to hear from people who played the Lead 4 as to whether it can create 80s synth pop/electrofunk/disco/new wave and some 70s sounds, or other vintage stuff... I know most people here are into vintage music as well and I'd be happy to learn or get advice from someone more experienced than me.