Anyone also disappointed by the W2?

[DJKeys]

OK understood. You may be able to accomplish that using the Mod Envelope affecting pitch.

I guess I never needed that kind of nuance in a lead sound, with delay and aftertouch vibrato, I am good-

-dj

[Hlaalu]

I agree that user presets are not fantastic and probably not meant to be. Getting a unit to market in a certain time frame shortens programming time. I kept about 80 of them and deleted the rest. Even in my Stage 3 I deleted all of them before I started programming patches. So far I have not used a single factory preset in either instrument.

It's interesting to see very different people's perception, in general, about factory patches, or Programs or whatever we want to call them.

I pretty much agree with what you say here. I see them akin to those apps pre-installed on a smartphone. I wouldn't even think of taking them into account to judge the quality of a keyboard, in general and in either positive or negative sense. I know that a lot of work goes into programming them and I am in no way disrespectful to people at Nord doing this job. So it's really just a matter of priorities.

With my NS3 I did pretty much what you did, I went rapidly through them to see whether there was something to keep, I kept very few and I deleted most of them. The ones I kept, was because I thought they would be good to base myself on to learn some synth, not because I thought I would use them as they are.

[tsss27]

Regarding factory presets I am the same way. I basically never use them, other than as starting points sometimes...which is why it amazes me how many companies prevent their factory sounds from being overwritten. Nord definitely got that one right in my book!

[DJKeys]

Exactly. I never understood why Dave Smith instruments/Sequential had 500 patches in my P6 that could not be overwritten. Many companies do not have the Sound Manager/Sample Editor which is a huge plus in my book.

-dj

[musicaldudeist]

The only critique I would over regarding Nord presets is that there is NO sense of organization to how they put them in the banks, at least on my Grand and Wave 2. If one was inclined to use them, it would be of great benefit if they were organized in some way from the factory so that they could be more easily located.

[alex78]

I think the reason of the lack of organization is the fact that every musician needs different sounds, so they give users the freedom to put them in the order they want, change them, delete them, substitute them, whatever...Why bother putting them in a specific order when it's most likely no one will keep that order? IMO Factory presets are more like a demo of what the instrument is capable of and how some things work. You use it to make YOUR sounds, to play YOUR music and that is awesome. Imagine all musicians playing with the same presets? Everyone would sound the same.

[DJKeys]

It actually happened in the 80s when the DX7 was introduced. There must have been 20 records with that DX7 electric piano sound on them-

-dj

[tsss27]

The D50 has a lot of very famous preset sounds too. Good presets become valuable on equipment that is difficult to program. I don't think they'd be too important on the Wave 2, or really any Nord for that matter, due to the ease of use.

[musicaldudeist]

You can give the users all that same freedom, and still have the nice touch of organized sounds as a nice cherry on top. Maybe some musicians don't use them at all, maybe some only use them as starting points. Either way, an organized set of sound used just to demo stuff still makes more sense than a random hodge podge of sounds, at least in my mind. And honestly, is it really all that much trouble? It takes far more time to begin with to even program all those "throw away" presets... the trivial amount of extra time to group, say, Pianos together seems quite reasonable.

Nothing about structuring the order of the sounds requires musicians to be less creative with their own designs, nor forces them to all sound the same. I can imagine musicians seeing a structure set of sounds and still designing their own. You can still make your own sounds regardless.

[Hlaalu]

Exactly. I never understood why Dave Smith instruments/Sequential had 500 patches in my P6 that could not be overwritten. Many companies do not have the Sound Manager/Sample Editor which is a huge plus in my book.

It actually happened in the 80s when the DX7 was introduced. There must have been 20 records with that DX7 electric piano sound on them-

I think the two above might be related. The company might have wanted to promote a "specific sound" along with the instrument. What you say about the DX7 is precisely this in my opinion: Yamaha wasn't just selling a synth, they were selling a sound that, in their hope, would become iconic. And so it did. The result of this is that there is a "typical DX7 sound", because everybody used those patches back then, while there is not (luckily for us) a Nord typical sound.