Nord User Forum

So I bought a Nord Lead 4 new and I've had it for a couple weeks now. Really happy with it thus far but just today I noticed the LFO1 & LFO 2 amount knobs are skipping values. Not huge amount of values being skipped but around every other value is skipped, so it'll go from like 1.1 to 1.3 then to 1.5 then 1.6 then 1.8 etc.

How much of a problem is this? or is there something I'm just not getting about the NL4? I've never owned a Nord product.

Well I see this hasn't gotten any response here so I'll take a stab at it. I don't have a Lead 4, though I do have a Lead A1 and a 3. The 4 is more similar to a 2/2x though. On the A1 I believe I recall (it's not in front of me at the moment) that some knobs skip values with roughly regular intervals - this lines up with the 128 positions around the circle that correspond to MIDI CC value ranges. If that's what's going on, it *might* be normal - both of your amount knobs seem to be doing it and it may simply be a way for that to fit a wider range of values into the 128 values expressed by CC. If, however, the values that are skipped change or move around (e.g. one time it goes 0.1 0.3 0.6 0.8 and the next time it goes 0.2 0.3 0.5 0.8), that's NOT normal and you have a damaged synth with likely dirty or failing pots. Either exchange it from the vendor or contact Nord technical support for a repair under warranty.

To find which is the case: check the MIDI data that the L4 is sending out as you turn the knobs and see if there are jumps. I am not familiar with the L4 but my guess is that it's perfectly normal as it does now. As 23skidoo said, more than 128 values have to fit within 128 "steps". Hence, some of them needs to be adjusted, stretched or shrunk.

Lots of settings in the Nord synth section of the NS2 also have this sort of "gaps".
The parameters do not have fine resolution and are implemented as look up tables of values.