What we want to do is:
Listen on 6 MIDI channels (use DUY placeholders)
For any note on 1st channel, output a note on Global channel (ditto)
Mirror the velocity but set the note to 60.
Probably discard any CC information.
(and same for the other 5 channels, with notes 62, 64, 65, 67 and 69 respectively)
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Appreciate it, thanks. Going to dive into this soon.
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What’s your overall opinion on the [Clavia Nord Drum 3P] guys? How do u use it, how do u like it compared to say Elektron Drum-machines or even TR8s?
It’s great. Has a really good sound engine that is capable of making all kinds of sounds. The tweaking of said sounds is fairly straight forward and button presses and shift functions are all logical. I use it in all type of setups. It works great as a sound source, does more than drum sounds, connected to the DT, or OT. Can be used with the DN, but then you’re only able to sequence 4 sounds, however the other two can be manually played. Although, as I foolishly forgot, and is mentioned below, you can use the global midi channel (I think it’s 10, but can be changed) and control all the sounds starting on…C1…one of the C’s, and progressing up the next five keys. Only bummer is you won’t be able to control the pitch of each sound using the keybed.
It’s funner than expected taking drum sticks to it, and you can tweak the velocity enough to use your hands. Really great instrument.
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Just a note that you can sequence all 6 sounds with Digitone, using the global channel of ND2/3. There, 6 notes each trigger one sound.
You can’t adjust pitch or CV, but you can hit all 6.
If you use one Digitone MIDI track for global channel, you could use the other 3 for more control of 3 individual channels.
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I love mine (about a month in, just coming out of honeymoon phase).
I play the pads all the time on mine. Both with sticks and hands but mostly hands. Tweaking sounds is easy, so far I’ve mostly used presets that I’ve altered a bit. I haven’t even dived deep into the sound machine but I love what I hear from it.
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Is it possible to break off the pads and make it look decent?
I would guess it’s possible with a good amount of time and skill. Wouldn’t be simple since it’s a metal casing with who knows what routed through it.
The whole thing is pretty tiny for what it is though.
Yeah, @Digichamp, there’s an unrelated demo video somewhere on YouTube where someone’s cut it down, seems to work fine.
Been looking but couldn’t find it unfortunately.
Here ya go:
It’s not clear to me whether it is a mod, or a pre-market/prototype unit that Novation received. Regardless, have you looked into the ND or ND2?
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@Calc, Care to share us the story on that Nord Drum 3P without pads?
ND1 is mono I think, ND2 is more expensive than a ND3p.
So I thought lets break off those pads and get the extra features that ND3p has for less than a secondhand ND2 goes for these days.
I bought this as a standard 3P with chopping the pads off always in mind. I had really wanted an ND2 really but they were few and far between when I was looking for one.
It’s a pretty easy job to desolder the pads from the pcb but the cutting the case was out of my realm. The base plate of the 3p is big and solid as… gotta be 3mm thick and an awkward “U” shape to cut if you don’t know what you’re doing. I’m lucky that one of my mates is a dab hand at metal working. I’ve no idea how he cut it but it came back perfect and shiny, so its definitely do-able.
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Thanks for sharing. That’s wonderful to hear.
So basically:
1 Open the ND3p.
2 Desolder the pads.
3 Put markers on the bottom plate.
4 Bring bottom plate to a metal shop.
5. Put it back together and done!
Seems doable and when done right it would look almost original. 
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Are the pads definitely unusable after that or can we imagine having pluggable pads on will?
I would think the pads are useless after the mod.
Ooh, picture please! I’d love to see how it looks now.
I think you’d be able to re-use the pads.
Its only two wires connected to the board so a TS jack and socket could be used to re connect them at will.
There is very little cable coming from the pads though so you’d need to solder some extra length on and theres not really anywhere to house the sockets on the PCB either.
Its totally do-able but just needs a little thought as to how you’d do it.
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Here you go.
The last pic is just before the op. You can just about see the tiny leads coming from the pad section that were soldered onto the PCB.
Uploading: nord top.jpg…
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