Nord User Forum

cphollis wrote:I wonder if metal rods come in Nord red?

I doubt it but if you insist on colour matching, it might be easier to use a piece of red heat shrink tubing around the rod part that remains visible after inserting it into the block.
I made a music stand for the NS2 and painted the rods black, but the repeated inserting and removing eventually wears the paint out.

How deep is the top of the Nord Grand? If it’s at least 9”-10” then you should be fine as-is as long as you have something that will be equally grippy with the top of the Grand and the bottom of the NS3C as the weight of the NS3C will keep it in place. Taking off the front two feet of the NS3C would provide maximum contact area.

I use both MD Auto & Marine Rubber Weatherseal (which you could apply to the bottom of the NS3C), as well as rubber shelf liner like the following:


You might need two layers of the shelf liner so the screws on the bottom of the NS3C don’t scratch the top of the Grand.

With a relative lot of piano-only gigs coming up, and a $500 off Memorial Day sale at a local music store, I finally took the plunge on a Nord Grand. It will mostly live in the studio - for two-tier gigs, which is 95% of what I do live, I’ll probably stick with my Kawai ES110 as a Dual KB mode controller - but I checked out the stack anyway.

My NS3C fits quite nicely on top of it with no additional support. I cut a sheet of that black rubberized shelf liner stuff to fit the top of the Grand and just plopped it on there, roughly centered front-to-back. The rubber feet “straddle” the top, keeping it from sliding too far forward or too far back to where it would become unstable. Slid as far back as that arrangement allows, I can read the screen and controls on the Grand with minimal slouching, but I’d probably keep it slid a bit further forward than that, both for ergonomics and because it wouldn’t take much to tip it backwards at that point (e.g. someone stepping on a cable).

If I end up gigging this combo a lot I’ll probably make some kind of a home brew solution to prop up the back while still keeping the super-tight stack, but for reasonably roomy and well controlled stages (which is all I’d be likely to take this combo out to), I’d be comfy as-is.

One possible reason why NOT to go NG + NS is that you'd have the same sounds on both keyboards. As much as I love Nord sounds, I like having different ones to choose from, so I'm sticking to NE6 over a Yamaha CP4 (which also has the best action I've tried in a stage piano, though I haven't had a chance to try the Kawai, which are reputably very good.)

The biggest limitation of the CP4 is that while it has a master keyboard control section per patch, you can't mute a zone locally (!) You can do it using splits if you only have 2 zones, but with 3 or more zones you just can't do it; have to plug it into a computer or something. Fortunately, with two keyboards, I don't (now) ever need more than one split point. But then again, I don't do Top40 where it might be more necessary.

Regarding stands, for me nothing beats the K&M 18880 with 18882 for second tier. I wouldn't try setting a NS or Electro on top of the NG, which looks just a bit to shallow to hold it. Maybe if the front of the top board sticks a good bit over the NG's control panel, but that's a bit of a compromise.