IHaveQuestions wrote:great bass with excellent synth sounds in a top board are important.
"Great bass" can mean different things. When I play left hand bass, I pretty much always use the sound of an electric bass, though even those can vary in character, of course. (Do you want the sound of a Fender or a Rick? Picked or fingered? etc.) One thing that can distinguish boards here is not so much the "quality" of the bass sound, but the variety you can choose from. Then you have jazz players who may want the sound of a string bass. A lot of other people like to use synth basses, there are some classic Moog bass sounds, or other more modern synth bass sounds, which can be a whole topic of its own (see
https://www.google.com/search?q=modern+ ... rslutz.com ). I think that almost any board will have good bass sounds... whether they are great depends on your use and what you like.
"Excellent synth" is another thing that's hard to objectively define. Synths vary a lot in their sound characters and in their functionalities, and the sounds are even more subjective than things like piano, organ, strings, brass, etc., because there is no real world reference for what they "should" sound like. But people have preferences, sometimes on digital vs analog, or even among analogs, the sound of one brand vs. another. There is also a question of how important it is that it be "knobby" -- i.e. you can create and real-time tweak the sounds with a full array of dedicated controls, rather than, say, working largely from presets and maybe modifying sounds largely via menus or an external editor.
Question: does this top (synth and bass) board need to do both at the same time? i.e. you'll sometimes be playing bass with you left hand and synth with your right on the same board, simultaneously? Or at any given time, will it be doing just one or the other? (Remember, you may also have the option of sometimes using your other board for one of these functions, even if that isn't the "main" purpose of that board.)
IHaveQuestions wrote:since a Montage is not a workstation but is deep, and the Kronos is a workstation and is exceptionally deep, how much since does it make to pair those two?
Whether something is called a workstation has no bearing on either how well it sonically pairs with something else, nor how well it will work for the things you're asking about. The reason Kronos is called a workstation and Montage is not is that Korg included a fully editable multitrack sequencer in the Kronos, Yamaha did not include one in the Montage/MODX (including instead a much simpler "performance recorder" plus free Cubase AI software to load onto your computer for performing the more advanced sequencer functions). That's not to say that the pair might not make a perfectly good combo (despite overlaps), just that the workstation-ness is irrelevant. (BTW, the reason I am talking about Montage and MODX bascally interchangeably is that they have the same sounds, so if sounds are all that matters, one will work for you as well as the other. However, there are differences in features.)
IHaveQuestions wrote:Shouldn't those two do about as good of a job as possible in a two board, no laptop setup?
Okay, so it sounds like we're definitely talking about a desire to keep it to two boards, and no laptop. Good, we've eliminated some other variables.
Getting back to the NS3 then, sonically, I think most people who look to pair one will pick something with strong non-keyboard acoustic instrument sounds (strings, brass, winds, etc.), because that's where Nord is weakest. Not unusable by any means, but easily improved upon. From that perspective, the best boards to pair it with are probably Korg Kronos or Yamaha Montage/MODX, though their are also other boards that can work well, including other boards from those companies as well as Kurzweil and Roland. (The pros and cons of Kronos vs. Montage/MODX could be a whole other topic.)
But to get back to your situation, if you want two boards, should one of them be a Nord at all? This depends on the value you place on its strengths (and also whether those strengths are also covered adequately in whatever other board you choose). I'd say the biggest NS3 strengths are
* high quality tonewheel organ emulation with real-time drawbar control (more so on the models with "real" drawbars)
* wide range of quality piano sounds of entirely different characters
* easy real-time manipulation of effects
* a virtual analog synth section with immediate, direct, dedicated access to its controls for editing and real-time tweaking
* ability to easily load you own custom samples, and process them through the synth functions
* some nice performance capabilities for expressiveness... i.e. the pitch stick is a unique bender, the morph function allows you to easily assign the functions of the wheel/pedal/aftertouch
* a sound set that includes a lot of uncommon vintage keyboard sounds
* light travel weight for the functionality (particularly the 73/76)
* getting all of that in a single board... particularly including a drawbar organ and a dedicated knobby synth control surface, since if you want those two things, if you don't get a Nord Stage, you almost definitely need two boards just for those two functions, which could quickly bring you to needing a third board for other bread and butter sounds.
So to many of us here, when it comes to a pair, an NS3 and one of those boards mentioned in the earlier paragraph is pretty ideal. But if some of those Nord strengths are not overly important to you, some other pair of boards may serve you as well or better, especially if you can't find everything
else you really want in just one other board.
Flipping it the other way, if someone had a Kronos and asked what would be a good board to pair it with, I think a lot of people would say Nord Stage 3... not so much because it adds quality sounds where Kronos is sonically weak (possible, but subjective), but more because it adds a different, more immediate way of working (albeit within a more limited sonic scope). You may or may not see value in that. If all you care about are the sounds themselves, and are not inclined to manipulate things in real time (i.e. if all you need to do is hit a button to call up a sound and then just play it), you may not care about a lot of what the Nord brings to the table.