Nord User Forum

Last night in the middle of rehearsal my Nord keyboard started to act up. When first turned on the display reads EL then 3.0 then a bright 0, then it just keeps cycling over and over and doesn't come on. On the rare occasion that it does if I touch the bank key it will go back to cycling over and over. I love this thing and its very upsetting. I just bought it used a few months ago. Any help would be greatly appreciated. randojazz.

Hi Rando,

Please contact me at my work email address or phone:

Bless,

Pablo Mastodon
Nord Technical Support USA/Canada
pablo.mastodon@AmericanMusicandSound.com
(800) 994-4984 x3030 USA
(800) 431-2609 x3030 Canada


For the benefit of the forum, here's a sample of what I commonly write in response to such inquiries:


I'm sorry that you are having this difficulty with your Nord. From the description of symptoms, it would seem that it will need to be seen by a competent service technician. Although you may get "lucky" and find that tomorrow it will work fine again, that would only mean that the fault is intermittent -- it will not have been "cured" and likely it will fail again (usually at the worst possible time if Murphy's Law applies).

The Nord contains a power supply board which takes the wall outlet power and converts it to various smaller DC voltages for use inside the instrument. The mainboard contains circuitry which monitors those voltages for consistency and when something doesn't look right, it can trigger a reboot. This is partly a protection mechanism designed to prevent damage. If, upon completion of the reboot, it again senses the same problem it again triggers a reboot. There is no magical software cure which will fix the vicious cycle in which the Nord is apparently stuck. This is certainly a hardware problem.

The question in this case will be to isolate the cause of the retrigger. It could be that the instrument will respond favorably to a good thorough cleaning of the electrical contacts. It could also be that one or more solder connections may have degraded over time and need attention. And it could be that one or more component parts have failed entirely. The diagnosis is best left to the electronics tech who has it open on her or his bench, but I thought your customer might like to have a general overview of what some of the possibilities are.