Nord User Forum

anotherscott wrote:I'll be curious about the enhancements to the vibrato function. On the NS3, there were global settings, and I found I could either set it for the natural sounding vibrato I wanted on an acoustic instrument sound, or the wilder vibrato I might want on a synthy sound, and it was frustrating that I couldn't specify the setting individually in different programs for the sound at hand.

spalding12 wrote:which is dumb in 2023 because memory is cheap
and quite frankly when someone's willing to spend $5800 on a keyboard that same person would spend $300 more to have three times the memory

As analogika said, the kind of memory Nord needs to work the way it does is not cheap. I doubt that raising the (already very substantial) price of the NS4 by $300 would get us anything like three times the 3 GB (2gb piano, 1gb sample) memory that's in the NS4.

spalding12 wrote: no one wants to have less than a full quality sample installed because of memory limitations

You can have the full quality sample of any piano (and then some)... you just may not be able to have the full quality sample of ALL of them. The way most companies deal with this is by not continuously coming out with new large piano samples you can load into your old instruments. That's a good way to make sure nobody ever runs out of space!

spalding12 wrote: 2 GB of piano samples is reminiscent of keyboards from 20 years ago

. Also, the underlying software architecture might not support addressing more than 2 GB, it could require a complete rewrite/reengineering of the system. Also, you need room inside the board to accommodate the extra circuitry. Everything looks like a no-brainer until you're the engineer trying to do it.

spalding12 wrote:

Schorsch wrote:

Gambold wrote: Nord is not innovating anymore - they are matured, like old wine. The Grand is pretty much a gussied-up Piano. There is nothing NEW on it, save a better, outsourced keybed.

who said this? ;) wrote:Nords are the best digital keyboards out there but you will pay a premium for that quality. Nord is the way to go if you want a variety of interesting and decent acoustic pianos.

Agreed
but it would be nice to be able to load all of them at their full resolution
at the same time
2023
or at least more than you could six years ago
or for that matter, 12 years ago
that's not good
no matter what the excuse may be
the fine wine analogy doesn't cut it with me
not for my $6000

mozart999uk wrote:Just curious. Some people have been mentioning a possible price drop in the future. Is that something that happened with the NS3? Is it worth waiting before ordering? 6 months? 1 year?

I had a stage 3 88 on order but UK supplier has just confirmed that they wont be getting any more in now.

analogholic wrote:

anotherscott wrote: There was no keyboard 20 years ago that had nearly that much. Or even 10 years ago, except for Kronos (which as maxpiano put it, is a " "PC in a keyboard chassis"). Even today, there are no Yamahas or Rolands (though Roland emphasizes their modeled V-Piano rather than large sample sets). Dexibell only recently broke 2 GB with the new S10, their previous boards maxed out at 1.5 GB... which they still boasted about because, in fact, even that was still more than most of their competitors. The S10 has 3.2 GB, so that's now about the same as the NS4, since the S10 has one memory pool for all of its samples (instead of the 2 GB for piano section, 1 GB for other).

BTW, to get an idea of what the kind of memory Nords use costs from other musical instrument manufacturers, here's a Yamaha memory expansion board that uses the kind of memory needed... $139 for half a gigabyte. https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail ... lash-board . Now, if it were built in from the start instead of an expansion board, it would presumably be less... and it might (or might not, as analogika said) be cheaper to do it now than when they designed those boards years ago. But just to use that as a starting point, if you wanted to triple even just the piano memory from 2 GB to 6GB at that rate, that's over $1100 more. Would it be less if built that way today? Probably. Would it be 75% less? I'd say probably not. Also, the underlying software architecture might not support addressing more than 2 GB, it could require a complete rewrite/reengineering of the system. Also, you need room inside the board to accommodate the extra circuitry. Everything looks like a no-brainer until you're the engineer trying to do it.

Hmm...the Kurzweil Forte had like what 3.5 GB? Don't remember when it was released exactly but IIRC way before NS3. And then it had 16GB non user loadable Flash, like a ROM

I think a good combo personally.

WannitBBBad wrote:Opinion: so far I'm not blown away by the videos. All of the artists are incredible players indeed, but most of the videos are focused on sounds that earlier Stage models could easily create.

AlexNagel wrote:

anotherscott wrote:

axryp wrote: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.

Exactly my thoughts! Instead of recreating all my maybe 20 different split programs that used a double bass in the left zone as identical copies but with an electric bass I could now just create those 20 splits once and change the left hand sound on the fly using the Synth Presets? That would be great.