Arturia Beatstep Pro and Nord Drum 2
I must say, CV is a great thing, and so are gates and triggers. But it doesn’t always work as expected. Specifically, triggers and CV can be more annoying.
One way to deal with any incompatibilities is RTFM (Read The Freaking Manual) for the two pieces of gear that you are going to connect via CV, Gate and Trigger. The other tools of the trade are oscilloscopes and multimeters. They will tell you exactly what is going on (depending on what is being fed into the tool.) Every vendor tries to be the one to set a standard in regards to specification, and over time, some vendors want to support the most common vendor formats. It’s like Hz/V as opposed to 1V/O.
Now, moving on to the specific topic of Arturia’s sequencer, Beatstep Pro, and Nord’s drum synthesizer, Nord Drum 2. I have seen many threads online regarding double triggering sounds. The way the Nord Drum 2 supposed to work is when it receives a trigger, it is a note on, and when it stops receiving a trigger, it is supposed to stop playing the note. The button on the Nord to trigger the sound is a true trigger (like a real drum) which sends a note on/off. It also supports t.ro, t.Ya, t.Ac1, t.Ac2, and t.Ac3. Kind of cryptic, but in the manual it covers what they are: Roland trigger, Yamaha trigger, and 3 Acoustic drum triggers (depending on the type of drum, i.e. kick, snare, and toms.)
There are 3 other parameters that can be modified to optimize the settings for your kit setup:
- Input Threshold
- Input Sensitivity
- Dynamics (no need to tweak this for this article)
The lower the Threshold, the higher the sensitivity to trigger the sound. The higher the Threshold, lowers the sensitivity. This parameter is used when you have an acoustic kit or a electronic kit (like Roland V-drums) and the vibration from the kit is triggering another drum. If that happens, you raise the Threshold on the one that is triggering when not struck. Sensitivity, is a way to match the incoming signal so that it is set at just the right amount of voltage sent to the trigger input to trigger it correctly so it does not cause a no sound on trigger, or double sound on trigger. On each of the six drum channels, there are 2 LEDs (green on bottom and red on top.) If you set the Input Sensitivity correctly, the Red LED would not just flash, but flash and turn off slowly (at the hardest strike to your drum trigger.)
Now that we understand how the Nord works, let’s look at the Beatstep Pro. It’s Drum sequencer has 8 drum triggers which sends triggers to a drum machine that accepts triggers. It supports both V-triggers and S-triggers (an inverted version of V-trigger). If you look at V-trigger, it produces +3V on trigger on, and 0V on note off. S-trigger is a passive switch closure to ground on trigger and remains open on note off.
So the big question is, are they compatible?
Sort of. One has to put a bit of effort to make these two devices work together. Here is what I did:
- Nord Drum 2: I can set the Trigger type to any so I kept mine at Roland (t.ro).
- Nord Drum 2: I setup the Input Threshold to a number greater than 50 (default).
- Nord Drum 2: I setup the Input Sensitivity to some number greater than 50 (much higher), sending Triggers along the way to make sure that the Red LED on the Nord Drum 2 stays lit on the hardest strikes on the Beatstep Pro.
- Beatstep Pro: On the Drum track, there is a KNOBS button for cycling the step encoders. I select GATE TIME, and set it to lower than 50 (default) for each of the knobs.
I can now control the sequence triggers of the drums and the double strike is gone. Also, I can hit the pads and the double strike is also gone. Now, it will still double strike when you do what I call the “lazy drummer” or “MPC drummer” type of drumming. When you hit a drum pad and hold it, and release the drum pad, it will double strike. You don’t hit a snare and leave the stick on the drum and then release it, or use the kick pedal to hit a kick drum, and leave it on the drum and then release it (no boom, just thud) on a regular basis. If you want a kick drum to boom and resonate, you kick it and make sure the kick pedal is not down.
If I was given this information ahead of time, I wouldn’t have spent 30 minutes diving into both manuals and experiment with the different values. Hopefully, it will work for you. One last note, MIDI works great with Nord Drum 2, so I may reserve my drum triggers on the Beatstep Pro to trigger Eurorack modules like a BD808 and the like.
Enjoy.