Using Electro 5 as a midi controller

[Steve Capper]

Since my Electro 5D HP has unreliable organ patches ( the volume will drop suddenly) I bought a Ferrofish B 4000+ organ module. My goal being to switch to the Ferrofish when needed and switch back to the Nord, however I still get the Nord voicings when I switch to the Ferrofish, even with the volume turned down on the Nord. Is my goal realistic? Any comments would be much appreciated. Thank you! Steve Capper

[cphollis]

Since my Electro 5D HP has unreliable organ patches ( the volume will drop suddenly) I bought a Ferrofish B 4000+ organ module. My goal being to switch to the Ferrofish when needed and switch back to the Nord, however I still get the Nord voicings when I switch to the Ferrofish, even with the volume turned down on the Nord. Is my goal realistic? Any comments would be much appreciated. Thank you! Steve Capper

"Unreliable organ patches"?

1. dirty keybed or similar -- I would guess that not all the contacts are connecting.
2. loose ribbon cable -- just open up the case and re-snug things, there are videos around

Attaching an organ module won't change much, as it's still the same keybed issuing midi commands.

[harmonizer]

Note that in order to get your Electro5 to send MIDI signals optimized for Organ playing, you might want to have your Electro5 set to an Organ part. My Electro3 sends different MIDI signals to an external sound module based on whether it is set to be playing an Organ part, versus playing any Piano bank part. This is most apparent when the external sound module is set to play a sound that leverages key strike velocity info, such as an acoustic piano or electric piano sound. If my old Electro3 was set on an Organ sound, the data sent via MIDI was that I was striking each key very hard, resulting in a very undesirable result from the acoustic piano sounds coming out of the external sound module!

If you can recreate at home the problem where the Organ volume in your Electro5 drops off, it would be very interesting to find out what impact is on any external sound module (your Ferrofish or other) when this problem occurs. So, if cphollis is correct that your issue in being caused by some physical keybed issue (dirt in contacts, or a loose ribbon cable) then you would see the same symptoms if you used your Electro5 as a midi controller with some external sound module.

Re your question on how to stop your Electro5 from making sounds when you are intending to use it only as a MIDI controller, one approach might be to set up a split. For example, you could set up a split someplace very high or very low on your Electro5, and set the volume on one side of the split to be zero. My Stage 3 has more flexible split capabilities, and compared to your Electro5. My old Electro 3 had only very limited Organ-Organ split capabilities. So I have not tried this using the methods available on an Electro5. But even on my old Electro 3 I am guessing I could have set drawbar settings all to 0 on one side of the Organ/Organ split to nullify Electro-created sounds that part of the keyboard.

[Steve Capper]

Thanks for your replies! I will check the contacts and ribbon cable and see where that takes me. That would be a perfect solution.
I'll try the keyboard split too.
My real goal is not just to use the Nord as a midi controller, but to be able to switch between voicings on the fly whilst performing using a midi on/off pedal but I will try the suggestion to use an organ voicing with ferrofish.

Thanks again

steve capper