Nord User Forum

I have a nord electro 6d. But I imagine this is the same for any nord with an organ.

Can the nord do anything besides stop, slow and fast? Can you control the speed of the rotary with a certian pedal?

What is STOP mode?

Why is the half-moon switch 250 dollars if all it does is give you a switch for something you can do with a button?

playsabadguitar wrote: Can the nord do anything besides stop, slow and fast? Can you control the speed of the rotary with a certian pedal?

With the Stage 3, you can morph (that's the term) the rotary sim to a control pedal, or the mod wheel (or aftertouch for the matter), and indeed you can have a "continuous" control over the speed of the simulated Leslie. However, you'll find anything with medium speed isn't very musical and therefore not very useable.

playsabadguitar wrote: What is STOP mode?

When engaged, it allows you to toggle between fast and stop as opposed to fast and slow. Stop means both the lower rotor and the tweeter horns stop spinning altogether. On half moon switches as commonly used on Hammonds, the stop is the central position or the switch (left being slow and right being fast).

And yes, the half moon switch is indeed overpriced. Because it is in fact a 3 way switch, however, it's not exactly the same functionality as the buttons. As explained above, you can more conveniently switch between the 3 possible modes. On two way switches like the button on the panel of the Nord, they had to come up with the stop mode to allow for this.

In Europe, you'll get the Nord Half Moon switch for around 150 EUR. Which is maybe because of a small series of handcrafted gear. And is pretty much enough. No idea why it's 100 EUR more over the Atlantic ocean.

After all, it's an additional controller anyway, and I assume it's much more sturdy. Get it if you switch rotary tempo more than 5 times in a piece of music. You might prevent a support issue for the button. Or use a much less expensive foot switch (only 2 positions: slow/fast).

Edit

There athere are various diy solutions for this. I spent about 30 euros on my halfmoon switch. For the footswitch I spent about 13 Euros.

playsabadguitar wrote:
What is STOP mode?

In STOP mode the button switches between stop (no rotation at all) and fast whereas in normal mode it switches between slow and fast rotation.

And why is the half-moon that expensive? If you look at it from the point that the half-moon is an optical reminiscence to an original Hammond accessory and that there seem to be people who pay much for all what looks like the idol then nord seems to be in the position they can ask high prices for these gimmicks. I don‘t use it, but mainly because it doesn‘t fit in the bag easily.

Cheers from Germany

Without a half-moon switch, you can only switch bewteen slow and fast using a standard keyboard footswitch. Nobody can fathom why Nord's half-moon switch's so expensive, especially since a much smaller company like Crumar sells theirs for "just" 70€! Taxman is right, you can build your own spending less than 30$. Buy a three-way guitar switch, a short three-pole (this is crucial, otherwise you'll miss one of the three positions) jack cable and repurpose a small box you've got laying around. It's pretty easy even if you're not that skilled with your hands, since you only have to strip the cable, connect it to the guitar switch, throw a bit of electrical tape in there and pack everything tight. Use velcro to make it stick. This is mine by the way: