Nord Lead 2X organs out of tune

[Ledbetter]

I play my Lead 2X factory organ sounds together with my Electro grand piano sounds and they are quite dissonant be cause they are not in tune. The synth sounds are fine. Has anyone else noticed this? What is going on?

[Mr_-G-]

How are you playing that? If by MIDI, could it be that you have some residual pitch bend from the controller that has not been not reset?

[Ledbetter]

Nope, from the keyboard. My bandmates noticed it as well.

[Mr_-G-]

Have you checked the tuning in the synth itself AND with a digital tuner?

[pablomastodon]

Do you have a manual for your instruments? You will definitely want to check the transpose and fine tune settings.

Pablo

[Ledbetter]

I'm talking about the organ preset performances, whose programming can't be modified. The master tune adjustment is fine for other performances, preset and user-saved. As I recall, performance 1.H8 is the biggest problem.

[Mr_-G-]

Can you post an mp3 example, and a few single notes octaves apart?

[pablomastodon]

Performance 1.H8 is the beginning of Prophet 5 land there. The organ partials are contained in 1.G5-1.H7. Please have a careful read of page 101 in that manual relating to these organ sounds. A typical tonewheel organ will have nine drawbars for each of nine partials. The object of the programs located in the those performances is to assist the user in playing meaningful recreations of drawbar organs. The nine partials are customarily written in terms of feet (taken from the old days when organs were all about pipes and pipe lengths). These are: 16', 5-1/2', 8', 4', 2-2/3', 2', 1-3/5', 1-1/3' and 1'. Basic physics tells us that doubling or halving pipe length will result in a tone which is one octave apart from where one started. The 16', 8', 4', 2' and 1' drawbars are all tonic -- they're all the same notes. But the other drawbars represent different intervals -- there are fifths, thirds, seconds, etc.

The individual programs you're listening to in which you are hearing notes which are "out of tune" with everything else are tuned that way purposely in order to allow the user to add those partials to their overall organ tone and achieve a meaningful tonewheel organ sound.

Bless,

Pablo

[Mr_-G-]

There are some sounds that trick the brain into following the "wrong" harmonic when changing pitch. One of those is the Shepard's tone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
Another very puzzling case is this one http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3944341 created with the Weierstrass function. But what I find interesting is that the tonewheel organs are a kind of simple Weierstrass oscillator (the sum of sine or cosine waveforms with different phases, frequencies and amplitudes). It might not be surprising that the 1.H8 performance could have a harmonic structure that also fools the brain into following the wrong harmonic when playing a sequence of notes.

Unfortunately I do not have a NL2X to really hear what it sounds like. I wonder if there is somebody kind enough to post short snippets of single notes of that waveform played at various octaves.

[Ledbetter]

It's probably not 1.H8 (a Prophet tone per Pablo), more likely 1.H2 or 3. My gear is still packed from the last gig, but practice is tomorrow and I'll make and post a recording. Thanks for your responses!

Mr_-G-, thanks for the fascinating links.