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numa Organ Weirds out on a Gig


blyons

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Hi,

 

I just took the plunge and got a brand new numaorgan. I absolutely love the sound on this thing and have taken the time to actually address some of the MIDI shortcomings with an old Yamaha MEP-4 that I'm using so that I can call up custom patches on a tone module and use the lower octave for patch changes on my module.

 

Here's my problem: Last night during sound check I plugged a sustain pedal into the hold pedal jack. When I stepped on the pedal to turn the Leslie sim on the Leslie came on and at the same time the unit went 1 1/4 tones flat. I have not been able to get the unit to come back to pitch through repeated power cyclings and now have to tune the board every time I fire it up and transpose up 2 steps just to get it to play in tune. I'm in Denver, so I'm certain that no one here even knows out to open the hood up on one of these things. Is anyone aware of some sort of hardware or software reset for the numa?

 

Thanks,

Bill Lyons

Denver

Yamaha Motif XF8, Crumar Mojo, Roland AX Lucina, Presonus Studio One Professional
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Can't really help you Bill unless knowing that I had a similar problem with my Numa makes you feel any better. Similar in that the pitch went wonky but in my case I moved the Drawbars and for some reason they stopped responding in the middle of a song and instead of acting normally one drawbar started changing the pitch, and the other Drawbars started doing different things too!

 

Luckily for me a reboot fixed the problem, but 3-4 more recurrences of the problem and I returned the Numa. Subsequently I found out that there is/was a known problem of a cable coming loose to the control panel which could cause unpredictable effects.. This could very well be your problem.. If you are adventuresome you might try opening it up and and reseating all the cable connectors.

 

Btw something tells me that if this happens once it will happen again so even if you find out how to perform a hard reset you may find this happening again in the middle of a performance like what happened to me. You reall need to figure out why it happened as much as you need to figure out how to deal with the symptom.

 

My perspective of course..

Craig MacDonald

Hammond BV, Franken-B (A100 in a BV cabinet), Leslies 122/147/44W, Crumar Mojo, HX3 module, Korg Kronos, VR-09, Roland GAIA, Burn, Ventilator

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Damn I hate that! Was wishing they were rid of those bugs as I secretly want one.

 

For what it's worth I had a similar sounding problem with my (used) kurzweil pc3, opened it up, and disconnected the keyboard connection cable, and reconnected it and it's been flawless since.

 

And I know nothing about electronics!

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Thanks Craig,

 

I was hoping one of the Hammond congnoscenti would come to my rescue. It looks like I've found another problem that could be related. The pitch bender bends full up (2 steps) but only bends slightly down. I'm wondering if it could be a part of the same problem or a hardware problem that's causing the first problem. Who knows? They guy who sold it to me is a full on hardware tech and my day job is senior software engineer so I know I'm covered. I've only had the board for 3 weeks and love the sound. If between myself and the hardware tech, we figure it out I'll be sure to post back.

Yamaha Motif XF8, Crumar Mojo, Roland AX Lucina, Presonus Studio One Professional
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Bill, as Tony points out this could void the warranty, but that would probably only be the case if you had obviously damaged your Numa in some way.. (like something is only illegal if you get caught). As I said, if you feel adventuresome you might want to try it, but be careful. I was going to mention the pitch bend wheel as a possible source of the problem too, but my first instinct is a loose cable, especially if you have two problems that are controller related... Sustain pedal/pitch bend wheel.. However the symptom is also somewhat related in that it has to do with pitch.. The first step should probably be to explore the support option. However as you can see from another post, opening up the covers and looking for a loose cable is something that a number of us have done over the years.

 

By the way, if you have a Numa, that has failed on you within 3 weeks with multiple problems, you might explore your friends return policy!

Craig MacDonald

Hammond BV, Franken-B (A100 in a BV cabinet), Leslies 122/147/44W, Crumar Mojo, HX3 module, Korg Kronos, VR-09, Roland GAIA, Burn, Ventilator

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I don't know if this will help or not.

 

I have the Numa, and had a mod wheel calibration issue which bothered me. I opened up the case (lots of screws) and eventually worked out how to reposition the mod wheel so that it gave both zero and 127 readings at each end of the scale. Feeling very pleased with myself, I was about to close the case, when the top part, which was sitting upright and resting against a box, slipped and fell backwards, yanking the keyboard-to-pcb connectors out of their sockets at the circuit board end. I had failed to release the taped-up portion of the ribbon connectors from the bottom of the case, so as to allow them free movement.

 

I did my best to reseat them - an incredibly fiddly job - but found that I now had notes cutting out, presets changing by themselves, and other weird behavior. I opened the case again, and eventually found that I had bent and dislodged the very fragile pins in the pcb connectors, and also scraped and bent the ends of the ribbon connectors. It took the best part of four hours, working with a mirror, flashlight, tweezers, and tiny screwdriver to manipulate the connections so that the two ribbons could be reseated. However, the repair has held, and I have had no further issues.

 

If your problem is related to these ribbon connectors, you'll need to be very careful. Pulling them out can easily cause damage. My advice would be to gently manipulate them to check if they are seated correctly before resorting to more drastic measures. Also, if you are opening the hood for ANY reason, I would remove the tape that holds the excess portion of ribbon connectors to the base of the unit. My laziness in not allowing the full length to be exposed and to fall free was the cause of all my woes.

 

Good luck!

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Hi guys,

 

Thanks for all of the great replies. I got an immediate response overnight from Fatar and from my keyboard tech in Philly. Looks like these guys want to help me out right away. You gotta love that. It turns out I might just have an assembly problem on the pitch wheel itself. The Studio Logic pitch wheel is assembled as follows:

 

Black Wire - Resistor - Left post on Pitch Bend Wheel

White Wire - Center post on Pitch Bend Wheel

Red Wire - Blue Three wire trim pot - with two leads shorted together - one lead soldered to the Right post on the Pitch Bend Wheel.

 

The repair tech from Fatar gave me a voltage of 1.65 to measure at pitch wheel dead center and with assistance from Tim at Retrolinear in Philly we were able to see that my measurement was off and the trim pot was not able to deflect far enough to get me back to pitch. Tim is shipping me a new pitch and mod wheel assembly and we'll see how it goes from there.

 

The one thing that I did notice was that it's pretty easy for the different wires to short together. Tim and I think that that might have been part of my problem but we won't know for sure until we plug the replacement PB unit into my board. The numa has a 2 year warranty which is pretty generous and the rest of the internal assembly looks pretty solid. It just looks like this PB Assembly could have been done a little bit differently.

 

PS - Thanks for the reply voxpops! Cracking open the board, I can easily see how you could yank a connector without really trying.

Yamaha Motif XF8, Crumar Mojo, Roland AX Lucina, Presonus Studio One Professional
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Its great that you may have solved the problem, and that Fatar are now on the ball. My experience with them and problems on the Numa Piano made me wish I'd never bought a Studiologic product. Maybe they're beginning to get the message that customer service is vital when selling premium products - and that QA is also just as important.
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Derrick Claybrooks

Pro-Audio/Consumer Supervisor

American Music & Sound

4325 Executive Drive, Suite #300

Southaven, MS 38672

1-866-474-7711 extension 4124

 

This is the number for Derrick Claybrooks, the main guy for service in the U.S. for Studiologic instruments.

 

If for some reason you can't find someone to do local service, American Music and Sound will pay for the freight on a warranty instrument to and from your house or another location to their service center.

 

A lot of times Derrick answers the phone personally so you might be able to get some answers from him about what is going on.

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  • 1 month later...

Numa Story, Happy Ending:

 

So, unfortunately I did have a defective numa. (Drag!). The company that I purchased my numa from contacted Hy Grauer, the Returns lead at American Music and Sound. I had to front them the full retail price of a numa, but they got me a replacement board in time for some Christmas Holiday and New Year's gigs. As soon as my broken numa hit their shipping dock, they credited my credit card account. All in all, a very smooth transaction. The new board is functioning perfectly. I'm still very pleased with my decision to purchase a studiologic numa.

Yamaha Motif XF8, Crumar Mojo, Roland AX Lucina, Presonus Studio One Professional
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