I enjoy the noises it makes and I can see great potential.
I’ve battled many functions not working and multiple multiple multiple freezes. Wiping the supplied memory card and starting from scratch with new firmware made it 80% more usable.
I’ve found the manual largely useless and confusing because my device doesn’t seem to respond to many of the commands in there.
I’ve found a work flow that means I can incorporate it into my production, but it would be sooo much easier if I could link my norand to ableton and the USB midi clock.
How do I do this? I can’t find any USB device drivers for the mono and ableton can’t see it. I’ve tried searching the Internet for other people’s answers (how I’ve overcome most challenges so far).
Everything about using this device has been a struggle and it feels like work. This isn’t a good starting point for creating music in my experience.
I sent a message to support when I first got it and couldn’t load or save anything, but got no response. I’ve moved on from that now, but need to make the norand mono mk2 something I can use to enrich my music and currently it is holding me back.
I want to love it, but it’s just a toy for me at the moment.
Thank you to anyone who can help, and if I find an answer I will update it. I see a surprising number of dead end topics on this community.
Bought mine last year and for few reasons haven’t spent any significant time with it. It does sound nice, but this support forum is about the scariest synth support section I’ve ever encountered. I just keep thinking let the developer see and absorb all this and maybe they will really put it back in the oven and deliver a proper firmware and manual…
Or I’ll just sell it, put it on Reverb and act like this website doesn’t exist…
This device behaves the same as 99% of the pattern sequencer / synth type devices. It can either be in Internal sync mode, or listen for external MIDI sync. To set up the Mono to receive clock from external MIDI (your DAW or any device generating MIDI beat clock), press Function + Clock (equivalent of the A note key on the mini keyboard). then press step 2 in the step editor row. Then press Function to exit. Once you have it set to listen to external, then you need to make your device send clock sync to it. In Live 12, open the Preferences, click “Link, Tempo & MIDI”. In the lower part of the window scroll til you reach the Output section. Find Mono and check the “Sync” check box to the right (second column).
If Live is sending clock, and Mono is set to listen for Clock, then pressing play in Live will start Mono, and keep it in Sync. The only other factor here is that latency from plug-ins, MIDI or your audio interface can cause the Mono (or any Clock device) to slip behind or ahead of Live. There’s a little disclosure triangle next to Mono in the sync settings of Live which lets you adjust the timing so that they are more or less in sync.
And for what it’s worth, the documentation for the Mono mk2 covers the different Clock modes it offers. Norand
Seq 1 = Internal (it generates clock and can drive other devices via its clock output)
Seq 2 = USB MIDI clock (which is what Live would send)
Seq 3 = DIN MIDI clock (from the MIDI ports on back of Mk2)
Seq 4 = CV clock if you are integrating with a modular setup
Oh, one last thing, and this is pretty common. When Mono (or most other clock devices) are set to only play with external MIDI clock, you will not be able to hit play on the Mono. It will only play, when Live (or whatever is feeding clock) starts playback.
Thank you very much for your thorough response. I believe this is the process I undertook, and Mono just didn’t show up as an option on ableton 10. This was via USB.
I’ll go through all of those steps you have mentioned again when I’m back in the studio, just to be sure.
Sync works find with my keyboard via midi.
Current specific issue:
Copy and pasting patterns within a saved project. I can make a pattern and copy and paste it from A1 to A2 and then to A3. Then I can’t copy A3 to A4 or any other slots, and the patch in those slots is restored to default so I can’t even program a new sequence without trying to recreate the original sound again.
Oh, I didn’t realize that your primary issue was it showing up as a MIDI device! So, you on Mac or PC? I don’t know PC. But one thing to get a handle on is which of the USB ports on Mono you are trying to use. I get confused about the labels all the the time. Try moving to different ports and scan to see if it shows up.
There is a global setting for whether patterns contain the sound settings. Because of how I work, I always have the pattern store the sound. I can imagine some folks want to build a sound and have it remain static as they switch through patterns. That is NOT what I do.
If you are aware of the global setting and it is not working, I guess you found a bug. But I thought the default was to glue the pattern + sound preset together.
When playing a song with normal patterns, the patch of the patterns will be called at each jump, so if you have the same patch on several patterns, it will be recalled as it was on each jump. If you are modulating a parameter live, this is not the behaviour you expect from the synth.
To remedy this issue, you can set a pattern in “patchless mode”. A patchless pattern won’t call it’s associated patch when it starts, it will keep the previous pattern patch. This way you can create a song with the same patch by setting each pattern in patchless mode (not the first one obviously).
To set a pattern in patchless mode, hold [PATTERN] and hit [RECORD], the blinking [PATTERN] LED indicates that the current pattern is patchless. Hold [PATTERN] and press [RECORD] to disable patchless mode.
