Nord User Forum

Hi all!

I am new to this forum. I was in Cardiff a couple of weeks ago and I played a Nord Stage 2 EX in a music shop and I cannot explain how much I fell in love with it. I got that "want" feeling. I'm a self-taught amateur pianist, I usually cover my favourite songs (Often Coldplay, Muse, RHCP etc) so I am no pro. I currently use a £500 digital piano that I bought for gigging in a local band.

Anyway lets get to the point... I am determined to buy a Nord Stage 2 EX, but due to the large amount of money, I am nervous about paying £2.4k for it and then seeing the prices drop if they release a Stage 3 in a few months or so. Does anyone know if it is on the cards at all (long shot)? I don't know whether I should wait until they release a Stage 3 and buy it for less when the price drops, or buy it now and pray I haven't mugged myself off haha. The Stage 2 EX has more than enough of what I need so I wouldn't purchase a Stage 3 if it were to release.

Thoughts???

Sorry if this has been asked a billion times before :/

Jack

You might want to read the following thread and make your on best guess/decision from there:

http://www.norduserforum.com/general-no ... 12019.html

Historically, Nord's Stage models (Stage, Stage EX, Stage 2, Stage 2 EX) have been on the market for 3-4 years before being supplanted by successor models. If it is true that past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior, it seems unlikely that an NS3 will be on the street any time soon.

That said, the NAMM show is now 6 weeks away, or is it 7...?

Bless, Pablo

I wouldn't worry too much.

Nord tends to incrementally improve their products with each successive generation. So the difference between current generation and the next one usually isn't huge. I'd point to the evolution of the Electro and the Piano as well as the Stage. If I were buying new, I wouldn't worry too much about what's down the road.

But I've stopped buying new, and maybe you should too? The previous Nord Stage 2 is a heck of a machine that can be yours at a steep discount as compared to a new model sitting on a showroom floor. I have a Stage 2 76, and feel absolutely no urge to upgrade to newer.

Usually with Nord, it takes being back 2 generations to make me want to upgrade. Good luck!

>Usually with Nord, it takes being back 2 generations to make me want to upgrade<

This is an excellent point. I have an Electro 4 and while the large memory and display screen of the Electro 5 are nice, they aren't enough to make me want to upgrade. I'll wait for the E6!

As for the split keyboard feature - I HATED that Nord didn't have this when I bought my Electro. But now I've realized it's made me a better player, philosophically - commit to one type of board during a song, and stop trying to be an effects machine for your band.

emartin149 wrote: As for the split keyboard feature - I HATED that Nord didn't have this when I bought my Electro. But now I've realized it's made me a better player, philosophically - commit to one type of board during a song, and stop trying to be an effects machine for your band.

And you made an excellent point too here.

Thanks! Indeed, the keyboard player is often expected to do things that are asked of no other musician in the band, to wit:

1) Recreate the same sonic wall that's on the recording the band is covering, including orchestral wash and synth blurps.
2) Play multiple different instruments/sounds at one time, or one after the other, in the same song. Whap those presets fast!
3) Use the identical instrument/sound that the original band used...don't you dare sub a B3 for that Rhodes part...

None of these are ever asked of the guitarist, much less the bassist, drummer, or sax player. People look at the Nord with all its magic buttons and think well there's our live recording and sampling studio. Can you be more Pink Floyd-ey on that?

Yeah. If they want the studio-in-a-box, too bad. I do what I do.

maxpiano wrote:

emartin149 wrote: As for the split keyboard feature - I HATED that Nord didn't have this when I bought my Electro. But now I've realized it's made me a better player, philosophically - commit to one type of board during a song, and stop trying to be an effects machine for your band.

And you made an excellent point too here.

I'll second that in a BIG way. Entirely too much energy is being focused on achieving that "perfect copy of studio recording" sound IMHO, sometimes seemingly more than the original artists do during live performance.

And while few things get under my skin easily, one which does is when I see a post from someone who just joined the forum today asking for "the perfect" program for some obscure (to me) song from some unknown (to me) artist, without even providing a link to the song (or a link to a twelve minute vid without mentioning that the synth solo doesn't come in until the ninth minute) and then "bump" the post eight hours later when there's still no response. Aaarrgghh.

I will take exception with one tiny portion of comment from CPHollis -- I thought the jump from Stage EX to Stage 2 was quite large. The basic architecture is obviously the same, which is nice from the perspective of maintaining conceptual consistency and keeping musos' transition from one to the other simple, but adding SAMPLES was huge for most people, and clock-syncable delays, LFOs and arpeggiators were very useful -- perhaps not so much to me personally, but I can appreciate that many others were made very happy by this. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but I like to imagine that an NS3 will have some features which will make some eyes pop even a little and inspire lust in the hearts of many.

bless, pablo

emartin149 wrote:Thanks! Indeed, the keyboard player is often expected to do things that are asked of no other musician in the band, to wit:

1) Recreate the same sonic wall that's on the recording the band is covering, including orchestral wash and synth blurps.
2) Play multiple different instruments/sounds at one time, or one after the other, in the same song. Whap those presets fast!
3) Use the identical instrument/sound that the original band used...don't you dare sub a B3 for that Rhodes part...

None of these are ever asked of the guitarist, much less the bassist, drummer, or sax player. People look at the Nord with all its magic buttons and think well there's our live recording and sampling studio. Can you be more Pink Floyd-ey on that?

I totally agree. As a keyboard player I like to be seen as a musician who can make a song work primarily by what I am playing (not what patch a have created).
For instance, I you were given just a piano and you were asked to play along with a band, it's really fun to make it work.

IMO keyboard players are too often seen as 'programmers' instead of 'players'.