I bought a Nord Rack 2 second hand and I'm playing around with it but really struggling to get anything decent out of it. I can't tell if I'm just really misunderstanding something, or whether it's perhaps broken or in need of a deep clean?
For example, if I save a patch and then play with a different sound for a while, when I go back to the first patch it never sounds like it did when I save it. Even if I put all the settings back to where I know they were for the sound I just saved, the sound will often be completely different. Sometimes it will play out of key or with crazy modulation, and I basically turn knobs at random and then back to where they were and sometimes it ends up sounding a bit like it used to.
Some examples of it being weird:
- Sometimes I'll be playing with it, then go and make a cup of tea or something and come back and the sound is completely different. Even though I hadn't pressed any buttons in the meantime. And again I'll just have to move things around and can sometimes get it back to how it sounded but quite often I can't.
- Sometimes while I'm playing, the sound will just completely cut out and I have to change to a different program and back again for it to make any sound at all.
- Sometimes I'll be playing with a knob (e.g. FM amount) and leave it say, half way up. I then try with it all the way up, and don't like. So I move it back to halfway but now the whole patch sounds completely different to how it did before.
- Sometimes I'll come back to a saved patch and the pitch will be shifted up several semitones so it sounds completely out of key with the rest of the track. I move various knobs back and forth and at some point it seems to almost randomly start playing back at the correct notes again.
Am I missing something obvious or does the synth perhaps just need a deep clean? The sound sometimes cuts out while turning knobs too, which I guess is another sign of it needing a proper clean.
Thanks in advance for help!
EDIT: Aha! At least part of the problem was being caused by the fact that when I turned the knobs on my Moog, it was sending CC via Ableton to the Nord Lead, causing the settings there to change too. That explains some of the issues (e.g the ones regarding the sound changing without touching the knobs), but it still doesn't explain the 3rd bullet point above, for example.