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Nord???


morty77

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I know it sounds great but expensive what are others opininons of the Nord ie Piano patches etc

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

KURZWEIL PC-3/KORG KROME 88/YAMAHA MOTIF XS SOUND MODULE/ROLAND I7 SOUND MODULE/ROLAND VK8M ORGAN MODULE/ROLAND A8OO MIDI CONTROLLER...UNFORTUNATLY WISH MY TALENT COULD MATCH MY GEAR:(

 

 

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Any Nord in particular?

 

They aren't my favorite pianos. I have an Electro 2/73 that I added a low E to, so it's now a 2/74. The acoustic piano sucks but was good enough for rehearsals in my erstwhile soul band. The pianos got much better starting with NE3, and it's great that you have dozens to choose from: download and install the ones you want to have at your fingertips. Different Nord models have different amounts of memory, and the memory required per piano varies a lot, so it's hard to say how many pianos you can have loaded at once. They all seem to have a characteristic honk in the midrange that I don't care for; I suspect that's a feature of the setup they used to sample the pianos. Regardless, I've heard fantastic solo piano tracks recorded by them and couldn't have identified so that honk I don't like can't be too significant. I bet if I had one to play a lot I'd get used to it or maybe even learn to like it.

 

I like their Rhodes patches a lot, and their Wurli even more. Their clavinets are I think the best, except that the release is too long to get the true funky tone needed for some songs. AFAIK, that's not adjustable on any models, either.

 

The NE3's user interface sucks: you only get two patches per bank and 32 banks, so you don't have many patches you can call up with just one click. (There are tricks to get around this, but they're complicated to explain or do.) My NE2 has 8 patch buttons, so I can call up 8 different sounds with one click. Starting with NE4 they have 4 patch buttons, which is less than ideal but a huge improvement over the NE3.

 

The 73 key versions of all NE's up to NE4 are F-to-F, which totally sucks, especially for someone who spent the last 35 years playing Rhodes 73 and CP70, which are E-to-E. When I set the octave so that low F matches the low F on those instruments, I couldn't keep myself from accidentally trying to play that E that wasn't there, hitting the cheek block. So until I modified it, I typically played it set an octave lower, wasting all the notes below low C. (OK, a piano has notes below C, and I even use them sometimes, but rarely enough that I don't need them on a stage keyboard.) So, I really could have had a 61-key board, and lost only a couple keys at the top. Thankfully, starting with NE5 (and for all the NE HP models, which have hammer-action keyboards) the keyboards are E-to-E. Yay!

 

NE2 through NE4 are monotimbral: you get exactly one sound at a time, no layering or splits. The NE5 is different but I don't know the details. IIRC, you can have a layer or a split (or one sound from keyboard and one sound via MIDI). Also, starting with NE3, you can load user-made samples, but with serious limitations: no multilayer sample sets. Nord has a wide array of sample sets free to download, for things like strings, mellotron, and all sorts of stuff. I don't know much about these as my NE2 can't load them. (Most Nords can load any of the sample sets, limited only by memory, unlike the NE2 and perhaps the original version of the Stage.)

 

In addition to the Electro, there's the Nord Lead (virtual analog synth, which I know nothing about), Nord Piano, Nord C2, and Nord Stage. The Stage combines the Electro with a polyphonic virtual analog synth and is multitimbral, and comes in 73-key semi-weighted (like the Electro), or 76 or 88 key hammer action versions. The C2 is a two-manual Hammond emulation.

 

A lot of people complain about the fast release on Nord pianos, and so many models (but I'm not sure which) have a "long release" menu option.

 

The Nords all have excellent organ sims. My NE2 is the worst of the lot; they improved the Leslie sim considerably in the NE3. Still, I find the NE2 to work great as a stage organ, and all the others are better, in varying degrees as they improved it over the years in various models. IMHO, the software VB3 is the best sounding organ (same as in the Cumar Mojo). I have and used Native Instruments B4 and preferred its sound to the NE, but the NE is so much more convenient (no lugging a laptop, providing a second keyboard tier, and working fine alone for rehearsals) that I don't miss using NIB4. The difference wasn't great enough to matter.

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