Nord User Forum

Hey everyone! New to the Nord world and was really hoping someone could help me out.

For a long time I had been looking at buying an electronic organ that could replicate that dirty Hammond sound and by chance the other day I inherited a used Nord Lead 4 - its a little beat up but it plays!

As much as I love it and am having fun with it, I am very intimated by the whole thing and have very little idea as to what any of the buttons or nobs do. I don't know it it has default presets within it or if it has been customised.

For now, all I want is to try and create that B3 organ sound to begin to play around and learn some riffs etc and get comfortable. I wonder if someone could tell me if this is possible or if the instrument is even made for/suited to this kind of thing?

Thanks!

Hi mrfantasy,

To be honest - no.

Sorry,

Eumel

Here’s the downloadfortheowners manual for the Nord Lead 4. Should help explain those buttons and knobs and show you what your new toy is capable of.

http://www.nordkeyboards.com/downloads/ ... ord-lead-4

The NL4 is a synthesizer so theres nothing to stop you using The Oscillators to emulate Organ Sounds but given your a little new to this type of instrument it will be a case of learning a little about synthesis in order to achieve the results you desire sound wise.

The "wave" setting in the oscillator 1 of the NL4 has a number of "organ" waveforms that you could use to try to simulate an organ . No Leslie, though!

I presume it is actually a very interesting undertaking to try to mimic a Hammond from scratch with a synthesizer. I tried a bit on my lead A1 (without much effort and equally limited success yet). A good start would be reading something about synthesis in general and organs specifically. I am currently having much fun reading this collection of synth secrets from sound on sound magazine: http://www.mediafire.com/file/7w2dcsqmk ... mplete.pdf

Part 14 introduces the basics of a tonewheel organ and how it relates to basic sound synthesis.

Please keep us posted on your successes/failures!

Below is a Hammond B3 patch. This is the closest I could get to a Hammond B3 organ, on the Nord Lead 4 Try it out!

Use Morphs and Mod Wheel to change the sound:

Morph 1 widens the sound
Morph 2 adds organ voices
Morph 3 is just a funny effect

Morphs 4 to 7 are the direct combination of Morphs 1-3. (I like to do this on my NL4 sounds, it's just intuitive to play like this)

Mod Wheel accents the Rotary Speaker effect

I used a single Oscilator (OSC1) with wave Organ 3 (and 7 on morph 2), Comb effect with LFO2 on the effect amount (to give the Rotary Speaker effect), and a little bit of reverb. Simple.

Try it out, and let me know what you think.

Cheers.

Gordon Reid's Synth Secrets series is a great resource for this sort of thing.

Start here: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques ... ans-part-1

That article is FANTASTIC. Using pure sines to build up organ registers works fantastic on the Lead. After noodling with the patch I grabbed a Lester K from EHX and I'm SET for organ patches.