NORD STAGE 4 officially announced for February 16th 2023

[SuperStage]

There are already about 4-5 threads discussing every detail about this, was it really necessary to open a new one?

Correct, better stick with the large thread about the Stage 4: nord-stage-forum-f3/nord-stage-4-offici ... 23347.html

The other post was filled with speculation and conjecture so I started a new one with the official launch info. No matter. How do I delete this thread?

[tomzi]

For me the interesting thing is this:
-Preset Library with Organ, Piano and Synth Presets including effects. 2x64 Organ Preset locations, 2x64 Piano Preset locations, 8x64 Synth Preset locations
-2 Individual Layer Scene Setups

[RockyRacoon]

Where’s EXT panel? To me this is perhaps a problem…

Coming from a Nord Stage 2 I am worried as well. On the Stage 2, there are 2 External and 2 Synth-Slots - for the moment I can only see the option for three slots combining the External and the Synth-Section on the Stage 4 - so there would be one less slot too use. I hope that this won't be the case - otherwise my current setup with two external synths will be in a bad spot. But lets wait for the manual...

Also: they seem to really have stripped down the external section. There seems no fast option to change a CC

[WannitBBBad]

Has anyone mentioned the possible lack of ADR(S) functionality on the NS4?

https://www.nordkeyboards.com/products/ ... ifications

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

It looks like some menu selection may be needed to set the Attack, Decay, and Sustain.

[Gambold]

With sales tax, a Stage 88 will cost over $6000 in the USA.

Clearly this is not a board for the working musician, much less amateurs. Nice for recording studios and well-heeled record companies to buy as loaners for their touring acts. Kind of like the people in all these new promo videos, none of whom have spent a dime.

This run to the stratosphere on pricing means the top Electro 7 will come in well over $4000 after the tax man gets his due. I said recently that the company was foundering. Maybe that was the wrong word. They are certainly making their appeal more selective.



I saw this coming. I just bought a Crumar Mojo desktop, which sounds awesome, for $950. I will pair that with a new Yamaha or Korg piano, say a Montage for around $3500, when I’m ready to sell my Electro 6. I suspect my Electro will move fast and well, given what Clavia is now asking for new boards.

I’ll bank the savings. My hunch is a lot of other people will too.

[spalding12]

It really feels more like a Stage 3 EX rather than 4.. guess I'll wait until 2029!

shocking that this is what we get after six years
I understand these aren't cell phones that sell to millions of people
and only a small group of people on earth will be willing to shell out $6000 for a keyboard
but why bother coming up with the new iteration at all if this is what you get?
The piano and every single memory should have been expanded
memory costs 10 times less than it did six years ago when the stage 3 was introduced
it should have been tripled for the stage 4
nothing short of ludicrous that it hasn't

[daniel70]

The Nord Stage 4 comes with a new enhanced collection of Grands, Uprights and Electric Pianos from our exclusive Nord Piano Library combined with new features such as Dynamic compression and Unison.Now that is interesting...

What does that mean? New Piano and Electric Piano samples or once again only „enhanced“ versions of the same old samples? „Newest“ EP is the Nefertiti, which is seven years old now…

[spalding12]

I understand also that Nord is never going to follow the path of Korg
giving us a larger screen
but... A lot of people who are willing to spend $6000 on a keyboard
our older and won't be able to play this without classes
the size of the OLED screens is ridiculous
I understand the button and not layout that is the hallmark of what this company offers
but you have to wonder why they can't figure out how to give somebody a screen a 60-year-old can read without putting on a pair of glasses
when you try to maintain a form factor just for the hell of it even though another one would make more sense
of course that's the hallmark of what Nord has always done
so I shouldn't be surprised

[maxpiano]

The Nord Stage 4 comes with a new enhanced collection of Grands, Uprights and Electric Pianos from our exclusive Nord Piano Library combined with new features such as Dynamic compression and Unison.Now that is interesting...

What does that mean? New Piano and Electric Piano samples or once again only „enhanced“ versions of the same old samples? „Newest“ EP is the Nefertiti, which is seven years old now…

I am not sure and we need to wait for more details, but do you remember the discussion on 6.x .npno samples in NP5 Factory Restore file which are different from the published ones? Maybe it is related or maybe we will see some 7.x coming out

[anotherscott]

The entire instrument operates with proprietary SEAMLESS TRANSITION technology, which enables seamless transition between sound resources, thus enabling smooth and homogeneous performances.

This sounds like it could be a more "complete" implementation of seamless switching, which on the NS3 works for some kinds of sound changes (i.e. between programs) but not others (within programs).

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. You'd have to go to a Program that contained that Rhodes sound, then copy-and-paste that Panel into the new place you wanted to use it (which also meant obliterating anything else you may have already put into that panel before you pasted your Rhodes-containing panel into that Program). And forget just calling up that Rhodes live, at the spur of the moment in a Performance, without obliterating the rest of the sounds you're playing. But now you'll be able to store your tweaked Rhodes sound as its own, independently recallable element.

The ability to do this is presumably a consequence of the additional effects capabilities. This really couldn't have been done before, when each panel could have only one set of effect parameters... i.e. what would have happened if you had tried to import an independent rhodes-with-fx/eq into a program whose panel already had other sounds with different fx/eq settings? Either the Rhodes wouldn't sound like you expected (defeating the purpose), or you could be messing up the other sounds you'd already made part of that panel.

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.

And unless it's been moved to the menus, it looks like we lost the Song Mode: it only lasted for one iteration of the Electro and Stage, who knows why Clavia hated it so much? To me it was a huge improvement in managing a set list...

I suspect they dropped it because people found it confusing, and Nord is about trying to keep things as simple and direct as possible. Check this forum for when those boards came out... an inordinate amount of questions were about this feature. People were confused, for example, by the fact that saving in program mode actual saved the changes you made to the sounds as expected, but it functioned differently in song mode (which didn't really have "sounds" but rather merely "pointers" to the sounds, a concept that is not immediately intuitive).

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.

A REMAINING IRRITATION: Still no velocity morph, which exists on the Nord Wave and Wave 2. That would allow at least a crude way to create velocity-switched samples, and the fact that they've already had this feature on other boards makes its absence here particularly disappointing.