NORD STAGE 4 officially announced for February 16th 2023

[AlexNagel]

Another important novelty in the management of Nord Stage 4 is the introduction of the PRESET LIBRARY, given the greater complexity in the structure of the sounds it is possible to create separately for each section: ORGAN, PIANO, SYNTH of PRESETS containing your favorite settings, so that their recall can be speeded up by programming the keyboard or even during a performance.

This is huge. For me, one of the weakest aspects of the NS3 was not being able to save piano and organ sounds individually. Say you come up with a great Rhodes sound (via effects, EQ, etc.) and you wanted to routinely use that Rhodes sound in conjunction with other sounds in various Programs. There was no way to save that sound in a way that it could easily integrate it when assembling new Programs.

Exactly my thoughts! Instead of recreating all my maybe 20 different split programs that used a double bass in the left zone as identical copies but with an electric bass I could now just create those 20 splits once and change the left hand sound on the fly using the Synth Presets? That would be great.

Also with a view to making the instrument more versatile in Live use on Nord Stage 4, another very useful function LAYER SCENE II has been introduced, which practically allows you to define two independent Layer settings by switching immediately from one to the other by simply pressing a key. For example: I can set on Piano an Acoustic Grand Coda with a String Layer on Synth, and on the next scene an Electric Piano plus a Digital summed with a SynthBrass, the two configurations can be selected by simply pressing the Layer Scene II button, obviously in Seamless Transition mode without interruption.

Ah, this looks clever! While it is immediately obvious that being able to independently enable/disable "section" sounds is a lot more flexible that only being able to enable/disable entire panels, there is also a trade-off for the loss of the dual panel approach... what if you WANT to instantly instantly enable/disable different multi-engine setups within a single Program? This looks like the solution. It sounds like Scenes are the new Panels.

I don't really get the new Scene thing. If they were the new Panels: How to activate both at the same time now? Don't think it works this way...

BACK TO THE FUTURE: My favorite other thing is having eight patch selection buttons instead of four. Finally we get as much instant patch recall as on the first Nord Stage in 2005! Like the old Electro 2, as well. I can't believe it took them this long to return to that, with the reduction to 4 or 5 being such a step backwards. Now the big question, dare I ask... might there be a way to see the names of the programs assigned to all 8 buttons, on the screen simultaneously? Maybe two columns each with 4 truncated names in the smaller font, something like that.

YOU'RE MY KIND OF GUY! God how I hated to have only 5 program buttons.

AND HOW I WOULD LOVE TO HAVE THOSE NOW 8 BUTTONS' CONTENTS VISUALLY DISPLAYED. OR THE F%&$%CKING "PENDING MODE" FROM THE NS2 BACK!!!

...Need to take my pills now

[maxpiano]

IMO, moving away from panels and having independent effects is a big step forward. A triple sensor key action on the 88 is also an improvement and step forward, although I'm not sure what it adds to the compact. The loss of the extern panel is a disappointment, it was one of the most powerful aspects of the NS3 and deserved upgrading and simplifying, even if was underutilized. The lack of a adding network connectivity or upgrading USB is confounding and disappointing; most the limitations of limited memory could be mitigated by being able to quickly reconfigure the instrument. Likewise, not having full ADSR on the synth engines in any fashion is a disappointment.

Both Extern and Envelopes are still there, but apparently no longer with fully dedicated buttons/knobs, more in a partially menu-diving fashion

[spalding12]

Of course I'm sure we are all enjoying the wonderful videos Nord is providing on every two hour basis including the one from 39 minutes ago
of course there is nothing on any of them that could not of been played on the Stage 3
it's just such an odd thing
you would think each of those people playing would actually have a conversation about why they thought this unit was better
I love hearing the music and the talent
and I can see there are four of the new units on display
it's just such a curious way this company does business

[spalding12]

Nord is not innovating anymore - they are matured, like old wine. The Grand is pretty much a gussied-up Piano. There is nothing NEW on it, save a better, outsourced keybed.

Nords are the best digital keyboards out there but you will pay a premium for that quality.

[quote=""and who said this? "]Nord acoustic pianos are still the best by a country mile. I went to a Sam Ash not too long ago - it's a reasonably successful brick-and-mortar chain in the US that has a decent keyboard room. I played several of the top competitors (Yamaha, Roland, Korg) to Nord in price and features. I was surprised at how unimpressed I was at their acoustic pianos. They all had one good one as their default and then a handful of progressively more artificial-sounding things like "rock" and "dance" pianos. Nord is the way to go if you want a variety of interesting and decent acoustic pianos.
[/quote]

[rockymtnnord]

SYNTH SECTION
Filter envelope (Attack, Decay, Sustain) with Velocity control
Amplitude envelope (Attack, Decay, Sustain) with Velocity control
Oscillator envelope (Attack, Decay, Sustain) with Velocity control

This sounds like it could be an upgrade over the Stage 3 engine. Stage 3 has two envelopes, an amp envelope and a mod envelope. The filter control can be assigned to velocity, LFO, or the mod envelope, but it doesn't have its own dedicated envelope. The mod envelope can also be assigned to control the current oscillator configuration, but likewise there is not a dedicated envelope for this. Now we have a "filter envelope" and an "oscillator envelope," which sounds promising!

But my big question on whether I buy this is about the sound of the Wave 2 engine.

Wave 2 owners, how do you like the sound over the Lead A1? Because to my ears, I'm not sure if the Wave 2 engine in the Stage 4 is an upgrade! I'm sure it's very capable, but from listening to online demos when the Wave 2 came out, it sounded far less aggressive than the A1 -- like it sat in a mix better perhaps, but at the cost of dulling its edge. Admittedly these impressions come from compressed YouTube videos of questionable audio quality, and I have not tested a Wave 2 myself, so I would love to hear what other people think about the Wave 2 vs. A1 synth engines.

[tetra]

Thank goodness Nord didn't release a Nord Stage 3 EX. My main interest was in the synth capability, but besides getting much more than just another synth layer, there's a significant step-change in overall functionality as well. My Stage 3 covers all of my needs playing out, it's the best performance keyboard I've ever owned, but at first glance I think the Stage 4 is going to be an incredible keyboard to work with.

[anotherscott]

I'll be curious about the enhancements to the vibrato function. On the NS3, there were global settings, and I found I could either set it for the natural sounding vibrato I wanted on an acoustic instrument sound, or the wilder vibrato I might want on a synthy sound, and it was frustrating that I couldn't specify the setting individually in different programs for the sound at hand.

which is dumb in 2023 because memory is cheap
and quite frankly when someone's willing to spend $5800 on a keyboard that same person would spend $300 more to have three times the memory

As analogika said, the kind of memory Nord needs to work the way it does is not cheap. I doubt that raising the (already very substantial) price of the NS4 by $300 would get us anything like three times the 3 GB (2gb piano, 1gb sample) memory that's in the NS4.

no one wants to have less than a full quality sample installed because of memory limitations

You can have the full quality sample of any piano (and then some)... you just may not be able to have the full quality sample of ALL of them. The way most companies deal with this is by not continuously coming out with new large piano samples you can load into your old instruments. That's a good way to make sure nobody ever runs out of space!

2 GB of piano samples is reminiscent of keyboards from 20 years ago

There was no keyboard 20 years ago that had nearly that much. Or even 10 years ago, except for Kronos (which as maxpiano put it, is a " "PC in a keyboard chassis"). Even today, there are no Yamahas or Rolands (though Roland emphasizes their modeled V-Piano rather than large sample sets). Dexibell only recently broke 2 GB with the new S10, their previous boards maxed out at 1.5 GB... which they still boasted about because, in fact, even that was still more than most of their competitors. The S10 has 3.2 GB, so that's now about the same as the NS4, since the S10 has one memory pool for all of its samples (instead of the 2 GB for piano section, 1 GB for other).

BTW, to get an idea of what the kind of memory Nords use costs from other musical instrument manufacturers, here's a Yamaha memory expansion board that uses the kind of memory needed... $139 for half a gigabyte. https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail ... lash-board . Now, if it were built in from the start instead of an expansion board, it would presumably be less... and it might (or might not, as analogika said) be cheaper to do it now than when they designed those boards years ago. But just to use that as a starting point, if you wanted to triple even just the piano memory from 2 GB to 6GB at that rate, that's over $1100 more. Would it be less if built that way today? Probably. Would it be 75% less? I'd say probably not. Also, the underlying software architecture might not support addressing more than 2 GB, it could require a complete rewrite/reengineering of the system. Also, you need room inside the board to accommodate the extra circuitry. Everything looks like a no-brainer until you're the engineer trying to do it.

[mozart999uk]

Just curious. Some people have been mentioning a possible price drop in the future. Is that something that happened with the NS3? Is it worth waiting before ordering? 6 months? 1 year?

I had a stage 3 88 on order but UK supplier has just confirmed that they wont be getting any more in now.

[spalding12]

Nord is not innovating anymore - they are matured, like old wine. The Grand is pretty much a gussied-up Piano. There is nothing NEW on it, save a better, outsourced keybed.

Nords are the best digital keyboards out there but you will pay a premium for that quality.

. Nord is the way to go if you want a variety of interesting and decent acoustic pianos.

[/quote]

Agreed
but it would be nice to be able to load all of them at their full resolution
at the same time
2023
or at least more than you could six years ago
or for that matter, 12 years ago
that's not good
no matter what the excuse may be
the fine wine analogy doesn't cut it with me
not for my $6000

[analogholic]

There was no keyboard 20 years ago that had nearly that much. Or even 10 years ago, except for Kronos (which as maxpiano put it, is a " "PC in a keyboard chassis"). Even today, there are no Yamahas or Rolands (though Roland emphasizes their modeled V-Piano rather than large sample sets). Dexibell only recently broke 2 GB with the new S10, their previous boards maxed out at 1.5 GB... which they still boasted about because, in fact, even that was still more than most of their competitors. The S10 has 3.2 GB, so that's now about the same as the NS4, since the S10 has one memory pool for all of its samples (instead of the 2 GB for piano section, 1 GB for other).

BTW, to get an idea of what the kind of memory Nords use costs from other musical instrument manufacturers, here's a Yamaha memory expansion board that uses the kind of memory needed... $139 for half a gigabyte. https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail ... lash-board . Now, if it were built in from the start instead of an expansion board, it would presumably be less... and it might (or might not, as analogika said) be cheaper to do it now than when they designed those boards years ago. But just to use that as a starting point, if you wanted to triple even just the piano memory from 2 GB to 6GB at that rate, that's over $1100 more. Would it be less if built that way today? Probably. Would it be 75% less? I'd say probably not. Also, the underlying software architecture might not support addressing more than 2 GB, it could require a complete rewrite/reengineering of the system. Also, you need room inside the board to accommodate the extra circuitry. Everything looks like a no-brainer until you're the engineer trying to do it.

Hmm...the Kurzweil Forte had like what 3.5 GB? Don't remember when it was released exactly but IIRC way before NS3. And then it had 16GB non user loadable Flash, like a ROM

I think a good combo personally.