Information Chamberlin Mellotron Strings/StrMachines Wind/Brass Tuned Perc Accordion/Organs Guitar/Bass Voices Acoustic/Electric Pianos Synth

Licensed partners

To offer all Nord users the very best sounds available, we have licensed the original Mellotron and Chamberlin libraries and teamed up with top notch sample creators Kirk Hunter Studios, Precision Sound and Sonic Reality.

Nord Sample Library

Compatibility

The following products are compatible with Nord Sample Library:
Nord Electro 3 (from OS v1.16 or later) and Nord Wave (from OS v2.02 or later).
It is also possible to make your very own sample library with the help of the Nord Sample Editor application.

More archives will become available online as soon as they have been completed by the Nord crew. All the sounds available on this page are in the Nord Sample Library (.nsmp) format.
You use the Nord Sound Manager application to transfer the files from the computer to the Nord unit.

Size does matter!

Our sample playback engine uses a high efficient lossless compression algorithm that makes it possible for us to fit more and larger sized samples in the memory of the units, without compromising the sound quality.

How to add these samples to your Nord Electro 3/Nord Wave

  • Download the archive and unzip them to the computer hard drive.
  • Connect the Nord Electro 3/Wave to your computer and launch the Nord Sound Manager.
  • Open the Samp Lib tab in the Manager.
  • Enable the Free Locations option to see all the available memory locations.
  • Drag a sample file from the hard drive to an empty location in the list of Sample Instruments in the Samp Lib tab.
  • Select Samp Lib and the sample with the Type and Model buttons on the Electro 3 panel or as a waveform for the Osc2 in the Nord Wave.
  • Use the Samp Init function on the Nord Wave by pressing Shift + Vibrato to initialize the synth to the settings the sample creator have chosen. This is done automatically on the Electro 3 when a sample is selected.

Descriptions in the file names

We use certain abbreviations in the last part of the file names, to give us (and you) information about certain qualities of a sound. Here is a brief description of some of these naming conventions that you can find in these files:

  • Vib - Vibrato
  • HighVib - more pronounced vibrato
  • ste - This indicates that the Sample Instrument is in stereo
  • Marc - Marcato
  • SR - these samples are licensed from Sonic Reality
  • KH - these samples are licensed from Kirk Hunter Studios
  • PS - these samples are licensed from Precision Sound
  • ST - these samples are licensed from Sample Tekk
  • PH - these were made for us by Pontus Henrikson

THE RETURN OF A
LEGENDARY SOUND

The classic sounds of the Mellotron - the tape-based sampling pioneer from the early sixties - are available in the Nord Sample Library to be used with any compatible Nord keyboard. When it comes to instruments having an impact on modern music evolvement, the Mellotron is second only to the electric guitar.

A tape-based electromechanical keyboard was invented by Harry Chamberlin as early as 1946, but it wasn't until 16 years later that the Mellotron company adopted the technology, making the instruments commercially available.

Playing back recorded sounds from a keyboard instrument had a major impact on the music scene in the sixties and the seventies, and opened the door to modern sampling technology.

A Nord Sample Library compatible unit comes shipped with a selection of the 68 tapes used by the Mk I, Mk II, M300 and M400 Mellotrons. The rest of this amazing library is available for free as downloadable archives. By sampling the sounds using fresh tape copies and a newly manufactured Mellotron instrument - built using vintage playback heads - the Nord units reproduces these sounds with all hisses and fizzes, exactly as they were meant to be.