Nord User Forum

Hi,

I own BOTH Roland FA-07 and a Nord Piano 3. They both are incredible and whoever says Roland doesn’t belong on the stage is not being truthful. Nords strength is there piano, organ and Rhodes. Roland excels at every other aspect. I gig weekly. For my r&b and pop gigs the Roland’s beats the Nord because of the amount of splits and layers and synth sounds available. For my blues trio, the Nord wins out because it has much bette raw sound for the acoustic instruments. (Ie piano , ep and organ). Yes the stage has a wonderful synth but in terms of immediacy and ease of use and “bread and butter” sounds the Roland wins. I would say choose the board based on what kind of gigs you do more often. By itself, the Roland pianos , organs and Rhodes don’t compare to Nord, but in a live situation it sound superb.

Just for context, I was recently stressing about my piano sounds in my Roland FA-07. I went to rehearsal with a new band a The main keyboard player was using a Korg triton...(old keyboard from 1999-2000 era) he sounded GREAT! .....lol point is, unless you’re playing solo, pick the board that’s easiest to use and most inspiring to play. Then go play and get PAId! Lol

Zbmstudios wrote:Nords strength is there piano, organ and Rhodes. Roland excels at every other aspect.
... Yes the stage has a wonderful synth but in terms of immediacy and ease of use and “bread and butter” sounds the Roland wins.

Besides piano/organ/EP, the Nord Stage also has the advantages of custom sample loading (for keyboard playable sounds) and more real-time synth manipulation. The synth also plays more expressively with aftertouch. I guess immediacy and ease of use can favor either one, depending on what it is you're trying to do. Most synth editing and effect manipulation is more direct on the Nord, as well as drawbar manipulation of course. Patch selection favors the Roland, though the difference has been lessened since Nord introduced "numeric keypad mode" in the recent NS3 update. But sure, the FA-07 is a nice board. I considered it as well, but for the things I was going to use it for, I ended up preferring the Kurzweil Artis7.

Hi I have used Roland and korg keys in my function bands for years and I can honestly say the Nord is the best purchase I have ever made the piano and organ will give you any sound of any record and split layer is the easiest thing to do on this keyboard and I have now the stage three which you can now have the two organs at time that I could not do on stage 2ex but still share the Lesley speaker and I to have had heaps of comments about my sound which I put through the pa in stereo and the sound is massive and the all important question about the synth it has great sax and brass and all the standard sounds but you do have to press sound init first to get you to bare sound then set attack to 0 then decay to full and release to suit then add some reverb which to me is the best I’ve heard it mixes in with sound perfect and the play with freq and filter button to dial in tone and you can still use the eq section to further tone shaping and then there all the other synth settings to for the wacky moog and weird sounds but there is never a sound I can’t get and with the splits and layers you have plenty of scope I do use two keyboards which I only use the 2nd for extra sounds as example trilogy by Elvis I have a piano and a vocal choir under it on my expression pedal then I bring in brass organ a second piano with the slot a piano and choir which is massive and again all on the swell pedal to get mix volume right but I use second keyboard for string part for and deep brass sound before middle bit and flute and timpani and I play piano with choir on Nord while flute part etc is playing but most of the time I just use the Nord so easy to programme and alter but bare in mind you can only use two synth sounds I per slot but that’s normally enough and you can on the stage 3 use a pedal to go up to next patch with out taking hands off to go to another bunch of sounds like I said at the start this review it’s the best keyboard live I have ever owned and would never use anything else hope this helps thanks
Mike

Not sure what you mean by 'having two organs at a time' but the NS2 models can do that too.

Mr_-G- wrote:Not sure what you mean by 'having two organs at a time' but the NS2 models can do that too.

He means having the Organ section emulation set to B3 on one Slot and a different one (for example Voxj on the other, which NS2 cannot do but NS3 can.

I’d weigh in, but I literally cannot read that post.

Bad formatting or punctuation errors can be tedious and cloud meaning, but they’ll usually give you a sense of phrasing or train of thought at least.

But no punctuation at all...sheesh.

analogika wrote:I’d weigh in, but I literally cannot read that post.

Bad formatting or punctuation errors can be tedious and cloud meaning, but they’ll usually give you a sense of phrasing or train of thought at least.

But no punctuation at all...sheesh.

I’ll take “Bad AI Bots” for $200, Alex.

Very short answer: YES...

jaws21014 wrote:Very short answer: YES...

He‘s asking about the Nord Stage 3, not the Electro.

Do you have any experience with the Stage 3?

I have some 25 or thirty analog keyboards and a handful of digital ones plus a bunch of effects, and the Stage 3 is surprisingly effective at covering nearly all of those bases in a useful way.

analogika wrote:I’d weigh in, but I literally cannot read that post.

Bad formatting or punctuation errors can be tedious and cloud meaning, but they’ll usually give you a sense of phrasing or train of thought at least.

But no punctuation at all...sheesh.

Funny you noticed that, the comments show the enthusiasm but I always try to do shorter sentences in English than in French but with this one, this is the longest sentence I have ever seen...