Nord User Forum

[23skidoo]

I for one hope Nord never, ever, in the history of ever, loses the pitch stick. It's the best thing for real pitch bends and is a key reason I love their gear. If you want a pitch wheel I beg you to buy another manufacturer's products instead.

[kbmatson]

Lol! Horses for courses I guess. I find the pitch stick to be just gosh awful.

[Eumel]

It does two things that a standard pitch wheel doesn't and that are more musically useful, in my opinion:
1. It moves in the direction your hand naturally wants to vibrate with the most control, and does so with a reasonable amount of resistance, much like pitchbending on a cello or other very natural stringed instrument. This leads to natural sounding and very controllable vibrato, note slides, and realistic lead bends, without wrist strain. The notch easily fits whatever finger you want to lay in it and the sides make it very easy to control even in a hurry on stage in the heat of the moment. I've never played a pitch wheel that gave me such instinctive and natural control for vibrato or guitar-like bends.

2. It has a non-linear (I guess logarithmic) response to the distance you move it. Move it a short distance the response is much more limited than the ratio of distance to total travel. This, as much as point #1, contributes to a very realistic, natural, and controllable vibrato and is instinctively correspondent to the response you get with wiggling versus bending a guitar string - more force and more distance are required to get a non-linearly increasing response in bend.

You can't do #1 on a wheel at all and I'm not aware of any wheels that implement #2, not that it would be very helpful since you have far less muscle precision trying to move your whole arm forward and backward as you do using the smaller and more precise muscles of your wrist or finger to go sideways.

=== Anyways, that's not on topic. What is on topic is that I predict the next Lead, whenever it does come out (and I'm sure it will) will have an OLED screen like the Stage 3, give or take. I hope it will also have:

1. The effects from the A1 (ok, you can toss the flanger or phaser, keep whichever is the strongest/least subtle, and replace it with a vocoder for you vocoder freaks out there!)
2. Three envelopes with versatile routing and LOOPING plus advanced sync and retrigger options
3. Two or more LFOs, in addition to an arp with patterns, gates, and chord mode from the NL4
4. Multiple modulation destinations per envelope and LFO, not just one (perhaps the OLED can be put to service to allow additional modulation destinations beyond the instantly selectable ones on the panel)
5. 2 fully independent oscillators of the NL4 but the waveshaping parameters of the A1
6. The Superwaves and custom waveforms if not actual 3d wavetables as options instead of the standard waveforms
7. All the usual features of an NL: 4 part multitimbral with at least 30 true voices of polyphony, unison steals no voices, etc. etc.
8. Instant morph, control pedal morph separate from modwheel morph, velocity, and aftertouch

I think we overlap in many ways...

[kbmatson]

All I can say is that I disagree with you on the pitch stick. The throw is too short and I have a hard time getting it to bend to where I actually want it to. Much more granular control with a wheel.

[23skidoo]

In the interest of offering a real solution and not just continuing what is clearly a difference of taste (and possibly use of pitchbend entirely): have you considered just adding an external pitch controller if you have such specific requirements? A touché or something like that offers even more fine-grained control than a pitch wheel does and is more enjoyable to use, too! Might make you happy to be able to use the same control on all your gear too. Just a thought, since it doesn't look like the pitch sticks are going away anytime soon (speaking hopefully, as well as practically)?

[kbmatson]

Well, since I use a stage 3, I don't really use a ton of pitch Bend anyway because of the music I'm playing these days, which is mostly piano and organ. And when I do, I can use the pitch stick effectively enough, and it's not that big a deal really. It's just that if I had my preference for a new synth, it would have a wheel. But as you said, I don't expect Nord to ever change that since it's sort of a trademark of theirs.

[criss]

A1 needs more than 26 voices in PERF mode.

[Mr_-G-]

I think they could improve on the pitch stick. There have been quite a few posts on broken sensors. The whole thing is expensive to repair. You cannot just change the sensor, (they are glued to the metal bar, you need to order the whole unit).

[23skidoo]

Well, I guess we can safely rule out any new synths this NAMM?

[kbmatson]

It would appear the big announcement is the little red speakers .......