Nord Stage 3 feature Wishlist

[TimeEcho]

Dear Nord,

Please stop messing around and have the Stage 3 equipped with substantial onboard memory. We are paying thousands for these instruments, for God sakes, just put at least 64 GB in there, bare minimum. It's 2017. Don't mess this up.
Hell, I think you should go all the way and have 1 TB for samples and expand your business of sample packs, or support Kontakt style libraries. Out do yourselves.

[Spider]

"I love the smell of trolls in the morning"

[TimeEcho]

"I love the smell of trolls in the morning"

I may be being a bit over the top, but I am serious.
You pay $4000 for a stage board and you can only load less than
400mb of samples. That seems absurd. You don't agree?

[jonilikeskeys]

If it was that easy, why haven't they done it before..? I'm sure they have their reasons. I'm no expert, but the storage in a nord stage is surely no simple micro sd-card...

[jfenton]

If it was that easy, why haven't they done it before..? I'm sure they have their reasons. I'm no expert, but the storage in a nord stage is surely no simple micro sd-card...

Yep, my guess is their processor engine would not even know how to address that much memory. It would probably require building a totally new architecture and if they,
did, it would likely be re-marketed as a totally new product line.

[Spider]

you can only load less than
400mb of samples. That seems absurd. You don't agree?

I have barely half of my sample memory loaded, so I have plenty of space left. And I routinely use only a fraction of those sounds (strings and brasses mostly).

Apart from technical issues that I won't go into (I'm no expert), I think the main consideration is the use of the board, and consequently what you expect of it.

The Stage is not a workstation that's expected to cover any and every sound in a studio, and as such it needs gigabytes of high quality libraries.

It's a live keyboard designed to provide basically organ, pianos and synth with a powerful effect section.
Samples are not its strongest point, because they're not its main focus.
Anyway, Clavia single-layer samples are very small, you can fit hundreds of them in the present memory -more than I would ever use, that's why I erased most of them.

Of course I'd like better quality (multilayer) samples that will require more memory, but 1 terabyte? That sounds like what you need is a PC, not a standalone instrument.

Even the Kurzweil Forte, which is probably the state of the art in this respect, has "only" 16 Gb of factory sounds and 3 Gb for user samples.

[pablomastodon]

1) Nord compression makes things MUCH smaller than other brands, so direct number comparison is not valid. I've got samples that are nearly 60 seconds in length and only take up ~2-3MB.

2) a fully maxxed out NS2EX will take ~1-1/4 hours to perform backup/restore operation. At 1TB, one could start that operation and take off to Jamaica for a week and the operation would still be in process upon returning home.

[hshir]

Hi All
I own nord stage 2, and I love it.
I have few things which I have found as limitation, you might want to
consider maybe implementing in future firmware if possible and/or, the next
Stage instrument:
1. Possibility to pan any of the instrument of the slot, which would be
saved on the program (without the need to use the a-pan, which is really a
waste of effect in that case).
2. Making the Rotary as part of FX section, making it possible to apply
rotary on two instruments simultaneously, for example, organ and piano,
independently (dual rotary engine), I came across many times I've needed it
and was limited (For example if I want one piano with rotary in slot A and piano on slot B with no rotary, it is not possible to do).
3. Possibility to program pitch band for more than one tone.
4. Possibility to have control on the reverb, and not necessarily have it on the Master output.
There are cases which one instrument needs to be dry and the other wet, or different levels or type of reverb, and on the stage it's not possible to do
it. Maybe you can consider making it dual reverb as the rest of the effects

[KyleM]

I usually have my Nord hooked up to my computer with Sound Manager Availablr, and I like the more trim memory because it's a live performance keyboard, and any of performance shouldn't need more than 40 or 50 patches at the most, so I think it forces you to program the board and be deliberate about your slots and really customize for your gig. I don't like scrolling through hundreds of sounds that often sound only slightly different.
If I'm recording I will load new sounds from time to time, but if not I just use the Nord as a MIDI co trolled.

[KyleM]

As far as the separate pan pots for each section that sounds cool, but in a live show it would probably be difficult to hear the difference, if you are recording that's a different story but you could just do it individually. I like that idea though.