Thread: Trigger a Korg with midi? Possible?

Hi. Ive been making music for a while now but I'm feeling like stepping out of my comfort zone and trying something new. So far I've been making music either completely on my Korg triton studio or completely on Nuendo. But here's what I want to do and don't know what the best way to do it is. I want to make most of my music on the Korg. For drums I want to use bfd2 as a vst plugin in nuendo. And record a miced electric in nuendo as well as voice. So far I've just been sampling a whole arrangement from my Korg and bringing a wav file into nuendo. But I was wondering if there is a way to make nuendo trigger the Korg to start over midi when I hit record in nuendo to record let say voice. And mix in the sound from the Korg and from the computer on a separate mixer. Or is there a better way to do this. So pretty much I'm wondering if I can trigger a Korg with nuendo the way nuendo would trigger bfd2. And how do I hook up the midi cord. Im using a Tascam as a sound card which has a midi in and midi out as well as audio inputs. Thankyou

Actually as you are syncing another sequencer rather than an audio based recorder you should probably use MIDI clock (which is tempo based) rather than MIDI time code (which uses absolute time position.)

You may also need to configure MMC (MIDI machine code) so that the Korg responds to start and stop commands.

MMC and MIDI clock should both be set up with Nuendo as the master and the Korg as the slave, and you will need a midi cable running from the Tascam midi output to the Korg midi input.

If you want to be able to use the Korg as a master keyboard to record MIDI into Nuendo you will also need another MIDI cable going the other way: Korg midi output to Tascam MIDI input.

You will probably also need to turn off "local control" for the Korg: this will configure the Korg as a separate controller keyboard plus sound module, so you can play midi into Nuendo without triggering the built-in Korg sounds.

Of course, once you reach this stage you may find it more convienient to switch entirely over to Nuendo for the midi sequencing side. Personally I think it would be much easier to have the whole song in one arrange page! The "local control off" setting is perfect for this, as you can then use Nuendo to record midi while sending it back to the Korg on the appropriate midi channel.

If you want to work this way with songs already recorded in the Korg you would need to transfer the midi into Nuendo. The easiest method would be to export a midi file from the Korg, then transfer it to the DAW it and import it into Nuendo. Failing that you could sync the two sequencers via midi clock, and record the midi from the Korg into Nuendo in real time. But a midi export / import would be much better, and I'll be surpised if the Korg can't do it.