Nord User Forum

Hello fellow Nord players!

I encountered a strange issue when playing my NS3 compact on a gig last night. Out of a sudden all my organ patches went really quiet, as if I had pushed my volume pedal all the way down. When I tried turning the volume up with the pedal the sound did get louder for a split second but then faded back. It sounded much like a broken / loose connection.

At first I thought my volume pedal had broken and I disconnected it but the organ stayed quiet even after a restart. However, all my other patches were sounding at normal volume. Even more strangely the volume pedal worked just fine with all other engines. It was just the organ that wasn't working right. The only way I could get the organ to sound at least somewhat acceptable was to turn the master volume all the way up and turning down all the other engines / panels to compensate.

I just tried this again and now the organ was sounding just fine. The volume pedal worked without issues and the volume was as it should even with the pedal disconnected.

It just occurred to me that the instrument was acting as if there was a volume pedal connected to the organ swell jack which was all the way down. I only use the ctrl pedal jack but I assume organ swell takes priority, i.e. if I was using volume pedals with both jacks it would be the organ swell jack that controlled the organ volume. There was nothing connected to the organ swell jack last night but I didn't think of trying to connect my volume pedal there.

Does this ring any bells? Any idea what might be causing this? Is there anything I could do to prevent this from happening in the future?

Swell also corresponds to MIDI CC4 on NS3, are you using the NS3 alone or with any external MIDI connected device that may generate that CC?

Good point. I wasn't using any midi devices at the time, just the Stage 3.

Volume pedals vary the electrical resistance. If something was impeding current flow (dirt, crud, cable, etc.) you'd get a much reduced volume, so I'd be looking for an intermittent fault on the volume pedal vs. the keyboard.

How did you get to solve the problem?
Today I had same situation with Stage 3, during rehearsal my organ patches get so quiet. Restart didn't help. I don't use any pedals accept sustain.

I once had same kind of problems with organ volume suddenly dropping on a NS3 when using the control pedal as volume through morph.
In my case the problem/solution was quit easy, but it didn't come to mind at once. In the menu, the pedal assign was to a different pedal than I used, and this caused the issue. Once the proper assign was set, all was back to normal again.