Undesirable MIDI behavior - Nord S3 => P6

[markwilkins]

This is a very vague (and probably useless) question, but I haven’t succeeded in gathering concrete details. So I’ll ask and try to update with details if I can get that far.

I have a Prophet 6 that I purchased new over 3.5 years ago (November 2016 I believe). It has v 1.59 of the OS. I have the MIDI out of a Nord Stage 3 connected to the P6 MIDI in. It works amazingly well and is a beautiful synth pair. There is, however, behavior that I cannot explain or predict. I imagine it is “predictable”, but after 2 or 3 months of experiencing, I am still unsure what is going on.

I have disabled the program control on the NS3 so the P6 stays on a single patch. It does receive and respond as expected to everything else as a general rule (key down, key up, sustain on/off, mod wheel, etc.).

But sometimes it gets a bit odd. I will end up bouncing between a number of patches on the Nord trying to find the “right” sound for something. Just doing what I think are normal things one would do with any keyboard. And then after playing a bit, I realize that the P6 just sounds totally wacky (technical jargon meaning, “wow that sound is making me super sad). Some of the things I have observed in various combinations are:

 - P6 pitch is down 1 or 2 octaves
 - LPF is opened wide
 - Something just sounds super weird and I can’t figure out what parameter is messed up

All of this can be considered normal since I can control all of those things from the Nord. But, for one thing, I have not knowingly adjusted any of those settings ... maybe it was part of selecting some existing preset? It’s a bit weird but perhaps acceptable even if I can’t explain it. The thing that I cannot understand, though, is that I cannot “fix” those settings on the P6. For example, if the pitch is down 1 octave, the octave setting on the P6 keyboard doesn’t respond. It’s effectively dead. And the low pass filter doesn’t respond. Just dead. Sometimes if I change off of the current P6 patch and then back, it will return to “normal” but sometimes it simply won’t return to the normal settings until I power it off and then back on.

Any thoughts or ideas?

[markwilkins]

My plan to edit the original post with updates has been thwarted. I’m not smart enough to figure out how to edit it. Maybe it’s not allowed on this forum.

I spent quite a bit of time this afternoon fiddling with things and found at least one thing (maybe it’s the only one?) that causes the odd behavior. If I switch between panels on the NS3 (on at least one patch), it would change settings including octave and other things that my ear could not identify. The A/B panel is a Nord thing, which means I probably now have a question for the Nord forum. Apparently, switching between the panels within a program causes some control midi messages to be sent. Switching between programs does not. I was able to suppress this by disabling control messages from being sent from the Nord.

So I think I may have “solved” the issue that was bugging me. I am still curious as to what is happening that leaves the Prophet in the weird where I can’t fix a patch except by rebooting, but that is of less importance to me than knowing how to prevent it, which I hope I may have succeeded at.