From my seat, I am exactly the audience for the Electro. Certainly 80% piano / 20% organ. But that organ needs to sound and operate in an authentic manner, which the existing Nord organ engine mostly does (save the 9th drawbar cancel hubris). I can even live with playing organ from a weighted piano action for that 20%. I use the samples on very rare occasions, so what’s in there is fine with me.Gambold wrote: ↑27 Apr 2024, 15:25 >An organ with an added piano section and a very basic sample player?<
That's an interesting take but I don't think it is either how most Electro users/buyers see the board, or how the Electro is being marketed by Clavia.
Compounding the issue is that organs require a different keyboard than pianos to function at their best. So on the Electro you have to compromise - do you go with with hammer action and piano keys, or do you take "semi-weighted" with waterfall? I think most buyers get the waterfall by default - and while the low weight of the keyboard is pleasant, in time the lack of good action for regular piano playing becomes ever more irritating.
So come time to upgrade, you have a decision to make, if you only want to cart one keyboard around. How badly do you need the organ? Will samples replace the occasional need? Since I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly), that MOST Electro players are using the organ less than 20% of the time, I don't see much of a future for the Electro.
The laws of physics pretty much guarantee that we won’t see a keyboard action that simultaneously satisfies both pianists and organists equally. Unless, of course, someone invents an action that alters the physical weighting and retracts the keylip edges when the organ button is hit. Well, Star Trek tells us there is programmable matter in the 32nd century, so we have that.
We can only speculate, but I would guess that the clone organ market is too crowded and wasn’t profitable enough for Clavia. That, and that the existing organ engine sounds pretty good, is most likely why the C2D is gone and investment in the organ engine has slowed/stopped.
I am not so bold to assume what most Electro owners like/don’t like or how they see the instrument. There are many varied use cases. It’s not a secret that the Electro is their biggest seller, so I doubt we will see it disappear. I’d like to go back to using one if the next iteration checks the right boxes.
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