Electro 6 humidity issue - anyone else?

[CanIHazKeys]

Hey everyone, new to the forum but I’ve been a Nord owner and professional musician in a band for, let’s see… almost 10 years now. I had an electro 2, and then upgraded to an electro 6D in 2018. It’s my baby and my favorite instrument I’ve ever owned by a significant margin. The semi weighted waterfall keys are just perfect for me.

The reason I’m posting is because I’ve had this strange issue for a couple of years. It seems electrical but I’m not sure. Basically, whenever the keyboard gets into too humid of a situation, two different buttons will tend to start acting as if they are being continually pressed over and over and over in a near-instantaneous manner. Unfortunately those two buttons are the page down button for selecting the active bank, and the octave up button. It never seems to be both at once. But obviously this is catastrophic when it comes to being able to make the sounds I am intending on making.

To combat this, I installed a passive dehumidifier into its case (a thing with a bunch kf silica beads that you can plug in to dry out). This solves the problem, but only temporarily. If it’s been a while since it’s been out away, and it’s humid out (since I live in Appalachia, it is always humid), then the issues work start. At first one of those two buttons will seem to occasionally press by itself, and the bank or octave will suddenly switch, but I can quickly re navigate to where I need to be and it doesn’t really mess me up at all and nobody notices. It starts to get more frequent, and then when it’s (seemingly anyway) accumulated enough moisture in the circuitry, it becomes unusable, it goes to bank A1:1, which is a grand piano tone (grand piano is my roots and I love it but it’s only sometimes what I’m trying to sound like), and if I try to change the bank it will visibly change on the display for a fraction of a second before it pages down again.

Somehow I have managed to avoid this happening during a performance since 2019 when it started happening. But the other day we were playing at a festival and it happened. It has just rained and the air was so humid that it was foggy/misty. Needless to say, it was upsetting, and my band mates were rather pissed off that I haven’t addressed this yet. Especially since it first happened years ago. In fact, it started the day after a show we’d played outdoors, where we were bombarded by gnats, swarms of them, and the next day I discovered that my nord was covered in dead gnats, they were between the keys and in the cracks between buttons. I had to use canned air to get them out, and each blast was blowing several dead gnats out from in the guts of the Nord.

Anyway, I was wondering both whether anyone else had experienced this sort of strange issue, and if anyone has any advice… I was hoping to avoid having to send it in anywhere, as we are pretty active and I don’t have another non-synthesizer keyboard that isn’t sub-standard in terms of sound quality. But I’ve heard Nords are difficult to open up. Ideally if I need to have a pro look at it, I’d take it in somewhere local (I’m in Asheville, NC), but I’m not sure whether this is a problem in need of a certified Nord tech, and if so, if I need to ship it somewhere?

Any advice is welcome, thanks!

[be lee vit]

I had a similar problem with my Nord Stage 3 Compact several years ago, though I didn't attribute it to humidity. Perhaps that was a factor.

You can read my thread about it here:

viewtopic.php?p=135408#p135408

Weather or other unknown situations can wreak havoc on our gear. The only real solution, if you're actively playing a lot of shows, is to purchase a backup keyboard, perhaps the same Electro 6. Then you'll have redundancy for shows and it also is handy to have one for rehearsals and one for gigs. That's what I've done since the '90s when I was touring with a Hammond XB-2. During outdoor gigs in the hot sun, my XB-2 would freeze up and stop working usually about halfway through the show. I kept a second XB-2 on the side stage and when this happened, our monitor tech would help me swap keyboards.

To this day, I always keep a backup available - in my case, I have two Nord Stage 3 Compacts. I usually bring the backup to bigger shows or ones that are far away from home.

Otherwise, check out my solution in the thread above and I'm wishing you the best of luck with this!

[CanIHazKeys]

Hey, thanks for the reply! Sadly, purchasing a backup isn't going to work for me, at least not at this time. As many or most of us know, musicians may be among the lowest paid individuals by the hour (when you count the 10,000++ hours practicing, travel time, "hurry up and wait" timespans between load in and performance, etc). I'm afraidmI can't afford to buy another Nord Electro 6D. But that being said, I've wished for exactly that on many occasions, if only to not always have to pack up after practice and lug my gear back and forth between the practice space and my house. So I'll perhaps move it up the priority list.

I'll check out your thread. Thanks!

To anyone else... do you think a Nord technician will be able to fix it? Or is it one of those things that is just a fault of the particular instrument, with nothing to do about it except keep it dry and assume the risk of failure when playing outdoor shows on humid days?

[Mr_-G-]

Do I remember correct, that some of those panel switches can be disassembled and cleaned? (I am not talking about the key silicone contacts, but panel switches). Maybe it would be worth having a look at those, specially if they are always the same ones that misbehave.