Nord User Forum

I have difficulty building presets with balanced volume over the 3 sections in my Nord Stage 4. Synth presets are coming very low, so I have to set them at the maximum volume, and as a consequence have Piano and Organ sections with low volumes. Another consequence is that I have to push the Nord in the PA system.

Am I missing something?

Thanks,

Pierre

The initial volume of all layers will be about the same. Which is already not what you'll want: While a piano will reach full volume only for a moment when playing a note, an organ can play out continuously with the same volume. For the synth section, it's even more complicated: You may have basic waves or samples with full volume, but after filtering and using envelopes, the resulting sound may be way lower.

As I don't use much synth stuff, I ended up setting piano layers to -6..-10 dB which gives a good ratio overall. But there are synth sounds that don't work on this level. If you use synths a lot, you may result in setting piano layers to -20 dB. If it was even more for you, there may be settings to consider.

Thanks for the explanation.
Pierre

drlaporte wrote: ↑30 Oct 2025, 08:31 I have difficulty building presets with balanced volume over the 3 sections in my Nord Stage 4. Synth presets are coming very low, so I have to set them at the maximum volume, and as a consequence have Piano and Organ sections with low volumes. Another consequence is that I have to push the Nord in the PA system.

Am I missing something?

Thanks,

Pierre

Not my experience at all, I get plenty of volume from the synth section and also through the PA. I guess it depends on how you build your presets. My synth presets always come in very hot compared to piano and especially organ.

How are you building your presets? It is possible to create them in such a way that they have very low volume.
How are you running through the PA? It could be gain staging or inadequate monitoring.

cphollis wrote: ↑30 Oct 2025, 14:18

drlaporte wrote: ↑30 Oct 2025, 08:31 I have difficulty building presets with balanced volume over the 3 sections in my Nord Stage 4. Synth presets are coming very low, so I have to set them at the maximum volume, and as a consequence have Piano and Organ sections with low volumes. Another consequence is that I have to push the Nord in the PA system.

Am I missing something?

Thanks,

Pierre

Not my experience at all, I get plenty of volume from the synth section and also through the PA. I guess it depends on how you build your presets. My synth presets always come in very hot compared to piano and especially organ.

How are you building your presets? It is possible to create them in such a way that they have very low volume.
How are you running through the PA? It could be gain staging or inadequate monitoring.

As cphollis said or maybe you are not panning the Nord outputs L/R properly on your mixer/PA and so causing some cancellation (have you checked if with the headphones the levels are OK)?

For now, I have been mainly using Nord synth analog presets - some of them are OK, some of them have low volumes. It is less the case with samples, and when adding my own samples I have been able to get good volume.
Thanks.

... by the way I found some of my (great) own samples to be not loud enough. Sometimes it makes sense, to edit own samples with the Sample-Editor again and set them a little louder. It is easy to set the volume low, but there is unfortunately a limit for up...

M_a_c wrote: ↑31 Oct 2025, 15:01 ... by the way I found some of my (great) own samples to be not loud enough. Sometimes it makes sense, to edit own samples with the Sample-Editor again and set them a little louder. It is easy to set the volume low, but there is unfortunately a limit for up...

Yes, better normalize your .wav samples in Audacity or any equivalent tool, before importing them into NSE

An additional observation about Hammonds. Even if you have two Hammond sounds at exactly the same volume, it will not be correct. The draw bars, make a huge difference. The Lower take up far more volume bandwidth. You can of course compensate to a degree with the swell pedal
Z