The NDLR (pron. noodler) campaign just started. It's $200 and like a lot of Kickstarter projects, it won't be available for a while, but it seems like an exceptionally cool piece of gear for the money.
The NDLR can play up to eight synthesizers via MIDI. It can send...
a bass line to one synth.
an arpeggiated sequence to your favorite lead synth.
chord notes of a pad to up to four synthesizers by using interleaved poly-chaining.
a drone note targeting those exotic evolving synths.
a MIDI pass-through from your favorite external sequencer or keyboard controller and it will be automatically transposed from “C” into the current chord notes.
I watched a few of these demos at work today. I am very interested, but a little hesitant because the menu looks like it may turn me off of it. Might give it a shot though.
I also really want one of their new products as well: https://conductivelabs.com/mrcc/
It seems rather expensive, but it also looks like I'd never have to unplug/rearrange MIDI cables ever again
that Loopop is a good overview. Yeah, for a product that is about workflow, menus do seem a bit counterintuitive, but maybe that's the cost of the relatively simple physical interface. Hopefully menu diving is more about getting that set up fine tuned and then performance is frictionless.... It's all about sweet-spottin' it. At $200 it was a no-brainer to try, but I was...distracted.
"In a moment of unparalleled genius, Noel Parachute headed off this potential disaster by unplugging the microphone."
I am very intrigued and there was one available on Reverb for a reasonable price. Not $200 USD, but worth giving it a shot.
I'm thinking I will have my DX-7 setup on the Pad and the Matriarch setup as one of the Motifs. Not sure if I'll use my Mono Station as the Drone or as the other Motif.
So I got the NDLR yesterday. It's surprisingly easy to set up and get going on it. The menus are actually rather intuitive.
I've learned a few things already:
1) I was assuming drone was intended for mono synths, but it's actually better suited to a basic poly synth as it can output the root, a fifth, and an octave at the same time. Setting the Matriarch as the drone synth was a lot of fun as there's a lot of motion you can get with the oscillator sync and tuning options.
2) I might not 100% understand it yet, but from what I can tell both the drone and the pad send a note on signal for the entire time they are playing. I really, really wish that both the drone and the pad had a gate length option. It would be much more useful and fun to mess with gate lengths and decay stages rather than just having the signals on the whole time. I'm going to email them to suggest this/see if it's a possibility with a firmware update.
Still haven't decided if it's a keeper or not, but I am excited to go mess with it some more.
ooh
totes see why the note-always on is a frustrating limit. probs a conceptually related limitation stemming from view of drones as static and pads as intermittently static. still
wonder what they'll say?
I remembered why I didn't hit this. I was in a "you can't just keep accumulating hardware" phase, and told myself to get in gear and use some of the fairly cool ipad controller/chorder/arpeggiator apps instead. but there's definitely something to be said for hardware for this kind of thing....
"In a moment of unparalleled genius, Noel Parachute headed off this potential disaster by unplugging the microphone."
I went to find some contact info on their page and saw they have a forum with a "Requested Features" section. Lots of requests in there for more gate control in there. Would have been good to read that in the first place
So I spent some more time with the NDLR tonight. I have it set up with DX7 as the pad, Matriarch as a lead motif, and Sirin as a bass motif. It's really cool to have all of these things playing in tune with a press of a button, but the motifs get a little bland after awhile as they play the same arp over and over again. I know you can set an internal LFO to modulate some of the parameters, though. So I'm going to try to dig into that this weekend. I could also try adding more movement with modulation on the Matriarch and Sirin as well. I also still haven't tried syncing it to the Digitakt and adding drums. That'll be another whole layer.
I'm going to to be trying one of these out for a while.
I agree modulation will be key. Finding a way to introduce slow/subtle pattern variation without too much nudginess would really push it into the yass zone. We shall see....
"In a moment of unparalleled genius, Noel Parachute headed off this potential disaster by unplugging the microphone."
