No Piano/Sample sounds work. Only org:Magnets on top of Nord

[simonbeck]

You haven't accidentally set the organ to its own mono output, have you? That would send the pianos and samples to the other output. I did that once, and I thought I had wrecked my Nord!

[Royer]

My hunch is that the magnet issue is a red herring.

Last night on the gig, our Nord 4 had a very similar problem. All of a sudden there was no output at all . . . trial and error revealed that the Organ patches did work, but no piano. This morning it worked temporarily. At one point I thought that plugging in the sustain pedal was the issue. It turned out that simply moving it around had some impact on it working.

Took the cover off--very simple, just remove the screws across the back and sides and then the one odd screw in the bottom center (not all of them)--and looked very closely at the cable ribbon connecting the motherboard to the keyboard. I tried just unplugging and reattaching it to make sure it was seated well. Ahhh but closer inspection revealed some little scrapes or scratches on part of this plastic cable ribbon--it's a 26 pin computer cable/ribbon--and then even closer inspection reveals that a little bit of silver wire was showing through the insulation.

The cable ribbon was sort of tucked under the keyboard and over time the action of pressing the keys was scraping on that plastic ribbon and eventually wore away some of the insulation. It was no doubt shorting out and moving the keyboard was sometimes, but not always, enough to move the exposed wire away from the metal surface it was shorting against. I taped over where the insulation was missing with black tape and ordered a new computer ribbon cable. It works fine now but I am going to replace the ribbon just in case when it arrives.

If you take that board apart like that, make sure that the ribbon is seated well in the sockets and that there is no damage to the ribbon.

[pablomastodon]

Took the cover off--very simple, just remove the screws across the back and sides and then the one odd screw in the bottom center (not all of them)--and looked very closely at the cable ribbon connecting the motherboard to the keyboard. I tried just unplugging and reattaching it to make sure it was seated well. Ahhh but closer inspection revealed some little scrapes or scratches on part of this plastic cable ribbon--it's a 26 pin computer cable/ribbon--and then even closer inspection reveals that a little bit of silver wire was showing through the insulation.

Disassembling in that manner is a recipe for (a minor) disaster.

1) Remove "the odd screw" from underneath the instrument FIRST.
2) Remove the rest of the screws as shown above in no particular order EXCEPT leave two screws (one each) on the wooden end cheeks: the ones at the bottom and at the rear corners; simply loosen them 1-2 turns.

This allows the lid to be lifted as the hood (bonnet for you UK folks) on a car, using those two bottom rear screws as hinge pins. This, in turn, allows one to get one's hand in there and DISCONNECT the 26-pin ribbon running between the panelboard on the underside of the upper chassis and the mainboard.

3) THEN drop the lid, remove those last two screws and remove the lid completely for inspection purposes.

As noted in another thread today, your problem is not 26-pin ribbon, but one of the two 20-pin ribbons. If your taping job is working for you, no problem, but if you are ordering parts you'll want to correctly specify that it's 20-pin you want and not 26-pin. You'll also need to ID whether it's the treble or bass cable you need.

Bless,

Pablo

[Royer]

Ah, OK, 20-pin ribbon. Thanks for the correction.