Why I just returned a Nord Stage 3, a Review

[taxman]

A Nord Stage 3 88 with drawbars
Really good deal

[Ecaroh]

From time to time I see people that love Nord piano sounds (myself included) but do not like the keybed or touch (I’ve grown to accept it). Then they concider buying a Compact model and better e.Piano or MIDI piano controller like VPC1. I too have tested this approach few years ago when I had Kawai CS-7 at home. But here’s my finding: Nords pianis do not perform well with external MIDI controller. There’s at least one annoying thing to notice and check: silent key press. If you play Nord itself and press very softly you’ll get what is exprected, namely silent ”note”, just like it is in real piano. But if you do the same with external midi controller no matter how low velocity is your press you always get a sound. You can even test this without external midi controller, just put Nord to local off and route Midi from Out to back In. Now somebody can say this is not a big deal, but IMO this thing makes Nord far from ideal as ”a piano sound module”. I don’t know how other manufacturers (Roland, Yamaha) perform as sound module but sure it ain’t like this with piano plugins like Pianoteq. You can clearly get silent press.

[FZiegler]

At least, the MIDI velocity curve got adapted to something more corresponding with other manufacturers'. Starting with FW 2.60 (Sept. 2021) for Stage 3. Before, I needed a MIDI velocity converter.

[maxpiano]

From time to time I see people that love Nord piano sounds (myself included) but do not like the keybed or touch (I’ve grown to accept it). Then they concider buying a Compact model and better e.Piano or MIDI piano controller like VPC1. I too have tested this approach few years ago when I had Kawai CS-7 at home. But here’s my finding: Nords pianis do not perform well with external MIDI controller. There’s at least one annoying thing to notice and check: silent key press. If you play Nord itself and press very softly you’ll get what is exprected, namely silent ”note”, just like it is in real piano. But if you do the same with external midi controller no matter how low velocity is your press you always get a sound. You can even test this without external midi controller, just put Nord to local off and route Midi from Out to back In. Now somebody can say this is not a big deal, but IMO this thing makes Nord far from ideal as ”a piano sound module”. I don’t know how other manufacturers (Roland, Yamaha) perform as sound module but sure it ain’t like this with piano plugins like Pianoteq. You can clearly get silent press.

Yes this is a limitation of Nord Piano section when played from external MIDI that has been underlined a few times in the past already, but on the other hand apart from a few very specific cases (or experimenting) you will not really use teh silent key feature or feel this has a big limitation when playing "standard" songs from an external keyboard (although it should be very easy for Nord to fix, just a simple modification in the firmware so that Piano section that would treat a MIDI Note ON with v=1 as a silent key, as already done internally...)

[cgrafx]

Yes this is a limitation of Nord Piano section when played from external MIDI that has been underlined a few times in the past already, but on the other hand apart from a few very specific cases (or experimenting) you will not really use teh silent key feature or feel this has a big limitation when playing "standard" songs from an external keyboard (although it should be very easy for Nord to fix, just a simple modification in the firmware so that Piano section that would treat a MIDI Note ON with v=1 as a silent key, as already done internally...)

interpreting midi velocity = 1 might result in the feature you are asking for, but don’t conflate the internal keyboard for external Midi because the internal keyboard is not a midi keyboard connected to an internal midi connector. it’s the raw keyboard sensor data that is interpreted with its own velocity and key on / key off coding and doesn’t have anything to do with the MIDI coding.

[maxpiano]

Yes this is a limitation of Nord Piano section when played from external MIDI that has been underlined a few times in the past already, but on the other hand apart from a few very specific cases (or experimenting) you will not really use teh silent key feature or feel this has a big limitation when playing "standard" songs from an external keyboard (although it should be very easy for Nord to fix, just a simple modification in the firmware so that Piano section that would treat a MIDI Note ON with v=1 as a silent key, as already done internally...)

interpreting midi velocity = 1 might result in the feature you are asking for, but don’t conflate the internal keyboard for external Midi because the internal keyboard is not a midi keyboard connected to an internal midi connector. it’s the raw keyboard sensor data that is interpreted with its own velocity and key on / key off coding and doesn’t have anything to do with the MIDI coding.

True (even if not 100% necessarily so, unless we could can reverse engineer the Nord firmware to confirm it) I but sincr the firmware they have implemented the translation of keyboard scan to MIDI then the reverse is also possible ("Trust me, I am an engineer" ... too )

[cgrafx]

True (even if not 100% necessarily so, unless we could can reverse engineer the Nord firmware to confirm it) I but sincr the firmware they have implemented the translation of keyboard scan to MIDI then the reverse is also possible ("Trust me, I am an engineer" ... too )

What you're suggesting is possible but not likely given the clear differences between the internal keyboard sensitivity/ responsiveness versus the external MIDI sensitivity / responsiveness, but you are also correct that we will never know for sure unless Nord actually provides that information.

[Valpurgis]

«But if you do the same with external midi controller no matter how low velocity is your press you always get a sound.«

Which in my mind is quite reasonable. Midi Note On has 128 levels, from 0 to 127 where the last is maximum level. If a controller registers a «silent note» it should simply not send any Note On.

[Ecaroh]

«But if you do the same with external midi controller no matter how low velocity is your press you always get a sound.«

Which in my mind is quite reasonable. Midi Note On has 128 levels, from 0 to 127 where the last is maximum level. If a controller registers a «silent note» it should simply not send any Note On.

Well, ”silent note” is by definition a note which is ON but not sounding. Somebody might ask why should we even bother? There are at least three reasons: first, real piano is like that and every decent digital piano and piano plugin on the market does respect that. Secondly silent note is not completely silent, it still makes resonances with others. Thirdly it should not be that difficult to implement, as said every piano plugin can interpret even Nords own MIDI this way. It’s kind of funny that Nord cannot do the same (if you route its midi from out to in).

As I have said million times here, Nord isn’t very skilfull with MIDI, it’s unfortunately quite opposite.