M-Audio Keyboard setup

[Jesse Johannesen]

Hey Jesse,
i thought i would have received an email in case of answers to mine but apparently i did not set it up correctly. So i'm glad i checked again.
So i'm sorry for the delay in this answer and i can't thank you enough for your help.

Let me point out a few things:

- as far as i understood i need a midi cable to connect the keyboard, i can't use the same USB that's connected to my Mac and control the key switch like that right ?
- like you mention a very interesting thing i wanna dive it is the SEQUENCING of chords change, but do you mean the Chord Sequencer inside the NDLR (i have not found
good tutorials on that and it does not seem so easy to grab) or are you thinking about a hardware sequencer. In case, do you have any favorite you'd like to recommend.

thanks and sorry again for the delay after your kind answer

Marco

Hi again Marco,
To receive notifications I believe you need to click on the "subscribe to this thread" button at the bottom left of this page.
As far as midi goes, it may be possible to route a USB midi Keyboard into the NDLR from your DAW, but has the potential to create midi loops that could cause a crash, so I don't recommend that if it can be done the other way around (midi into NDLR via din, passed through USB to DAW).

If you plan to use the transport functions on your keyboard (start stop etc) then be sure to use MIDI DIN port B in, and connect to your DAW via USB port 2, as these are the only ports that pass this info. Here is a chart of how the NDLR passes MIDI data from the manual for your convenience:    

I was talking about using an external sequencer to control the NDLR, and really anything could work it just needs to be able to send notes to the NDLR Ctrl Channel, but if it can send CC changes as well, all the better as basically everything on the NDLR can be controlled by MIDI CCs. Ableton Live would be a great place to start, as you can draw in the piano roll for chord changes you want to make and add envelope channels for the CCs you want to edit, but it isn't the only option by any means, a novation circuit would work great, or even one of the Elektron Model: series if you wanted to keep it out of the box.

The Chord sequencer is a little difficult to grasp initially, but once you get your head around it it becomes pretty straight forward:

To get to the Chord Seq page, press [SHIFT+MENU] followed by a press of the top left encoder button.

The encoders are associated with the screen selection icons at the same height, so the top two encoders edit selection of which slot to save/load.

The Chord Seq is made up of 3 chord progressions, A, B, and C, these are shown in the third section of the screen labeled "Sections". The section being edited shows up as a yellow square. The 3rd knob down on the left selects which slot is being edited. Each slot holds info for Count in 1/4 notes, Scale, Chord Degree, and Chord Type. These values are entered in the screen section above.

The second row down the left encoder highlights which object to edit in the second section of the screen (current selection will show up highlighted yellow), the right encoder second from the top will make changes to the selection. These are the values mentioned above, and each of the Sections is made up of 6 squares, you can fill all six squares with info or leave them empty and they will be skipped. So you could have Section A consist of 8 1/4 notes, in Scale A Major, Chord Degree I (A Maj) and Triad Chord Shape.

Then the next slot in A (in section 3 "Sections") could be 4 1/4 notes long, still in A Major, Chord Degree V (E Maj) and Triad.

Then the third slot we could put to 4 1/4 notes long, still A Maj, Chord Deg IV (D Maj) and 7th chord shape.

The 4th portion of the screen is where we choose which Sections we want to play, in which order, and with how many repeats they have. Since this example we only layed out section A, we could just use the bottom pair of encoders using the left to select value to edit and the right to change that value, in the first slot we would select A and in the second value we could put 4 to repeat 4 times, now lets pretend we entered step values for Section B, and we want to play that 2 times before going back to the A section. We would navigate to the 3rd value in the bottom section and choose B then move over to the right to select x2 repeats. This would give us a little song with 2 parts.

To enable the NDLR to play this, you would turn the 3rd knob down on the right until it the little display window shows ARMED in green. Now when we hit play, the NDLR takes its chord and scale info from here and the changes happen in time with the tempo corresponding to the note lengths we selected above.

So, you can make up to three sections, each with 6 possible chord (and scale) changes, and sequence them to play in any order with 8 possible changes and as many as 8 repeats per section. To stop the Chord Seq, turn the knob you enabled it with until it shows Disarmed in red.

I hope this helps.

Jesse