Nord User Forum

jazzystu wrote:Trading standards in the UK would have a fit. It doesn't say anything anywhere about them sampling the pianos totally.

Hi, I do not get it. What would trading standards have a fit about?

If a person is looking at a product and reads a description of that product and gains an idea of what the product is, that is a description. If when the person buys the product and it is different, that is a violation of the Trades Description Act which is in turn underpinned by contract law.

In law, stuff in the small print, or hidden in the box when you buy it violates contract law. Essentially, it says that among other things (features of a contract) that there has to be full disclosure between both parties. This cannot be hiding somewhere. So when you say "Here is a 1976 Rhodes Stage Piano which was adjusted for it's bassy behaviour" it means that what you stand to gain from that is a fully sampled piano. If it was less than that, it would have to be stated.

I made the choice a couple of years ago to buy a Nord rather than old obsolete gear because their website clearly stated they had sampled some old Rhodes gear. Knowing more than average about the process, I assumed that what I would get would be something which was fully sampled, like the rather plebian and crap scarbee piano and the neo-soul pianos.

Anyone reading the Nord website can quite clearly see that what they are signing themselves up for is a fully sampled 19whatever it is stage piano ad a 19something else suitcase piano and a 19 later Mk5 and all that s***. There is no mention of them using it as a template.

We are talking about a £2500 choice here. It's major money for some.

Anyway, since I have a chum in trading standards, I might see what he has to say about the matter.

The law would come down hard on those who have mislead their customers.

So, have a read of their piano library stuff. Have a listen to what it sounds like. Have a think about why it doesn't sound like what it is meant to sound like and ask yourself this question.

"Have Nord fully sampled the various electric pianos, or have they used a couple of pianos as models to influence their digital programming"

"Have they misled their customers?"

I can quite frankly tell you that I put £2500 on the table on the strength that I was getting the best possible fully sampled 19 so-and-so piano. It appears that this is not the case.

Anyway, we shall see what Big Mike has to say about the matter. I just thought that the Electric Piano samples were magically small, I didn't realise that this was due to them cutting corners.

Let's see where this goes, because what you read on their website and what you actually get are two different things.

For the record, I'd quite happily pay £5000 for the right piece of kit. I would conclude that in this case, I (and perhaps some others of you) had been mislead by a false description.

IMHO. I think you are overreacting. I don't think nord actually claim to have sampled every note at multiple velocities - you are reading between the lines and jumping to conclusions.

Personally when I tried the stage 2 before purchase, I came to the conclusion that the sounds were the most convincing I was going to find in a single unit with the flexibility I need. Lets not forget it carries the C2 engine as well.

I think a sample library that delivers what you are asking for will take several GB's of space especially if you want the stock selection of grands, uprights, Rhodes, Whirly, clavs and harpsichords. This fast flash memory is not cheap either and would certainly have priced the board way outside of the market - at least another grand on top.

I go back to my previous point. It is a STAGE instrument (the name should be a clue). It's not a replacement for classic gear just a means for working musicians to carry around a single unit that does a pretty convincing job of covering a vast array to organs, hammer instruments, mellotron, sample libs and synths.

No all-rounder is going to be perfect at everything. If you are after authentic sounds for recording with, you might be better off looking at dedicated plug ins. For a gigging all rounder, I still believe the stage holds its own. I get a LOT of people approach me at gigs to compliment the sound of my board (something I never experienced in the past). I believe it's got me more gigs through word of mouth. Not ONE person has ever said "That Bb doesn't sound like it was properly sampled from a 19whatever MK 1 Rhodes"

+1 for Darren

I see a lot of people on that forum giving s*** to Clavia about out of date Rhodes samples. Not sure why Clavia has not presented the better Rhodes samples yet. It should be much easier to sample Rhodes rather then Grand Piano.

Read the piano library descriptions and it suggest straight away that they have taken a full instrument and replicated it. Essentially you "get" a full EP whatever it is, like you do with a Yamaha Grand, or whatever.

A normal person reading this description would come to this conclusion, this is what the gist of it is.

Hence if they get anything else, they have been mislead. Perhaps they mislead themselves but they most certainly got someone different to what was in the spirit of the description.

For instance, when I go along to a classic car replicator place and read:-

1966 AC Cobra, we took an original Le Mans racing cobra and tuned it to perfection and got Carroll Shelby himself to tick all it's boxes, we bring to you a piece of motoring history, ready to race and ready to please.

When I put my £60k on the deck, wheel it out to the start line and am surprised to hear the rattle of a 1.6 diesel engine, I'd be pretty irritated. What you appear to be inferring is that "everyone knows that when you buy a replica car, most of them have small diesel engines, duuurrrrr dummy!!!!"

There wasn't even a *


(* By the way, when we say sampled, we actually mean not really sampled, but some sampling and a lot of jiggery pokery)


You have got to admit it, as a reasonable person that

"In 1965 the new tine based Electric Pianos became available in several configurations and all the pianos manufactured during this period featured wooden piano hammers (felt-covered, teardrop shape) and non-tapered Ray-Mac tines. This combination produced the raw, bell-like sound heard on many famous recordings. It is set to ''ideal timbre'', with a ''medium miking'' distance." under one of their "product choices" would lead you to thinking that the instrument would have been sampled, not modelled upon.

I do think Nord are amazing but in this case, I am merely irritated by the fact that they appear (well, some suggest) the EPs are partially stretched and modelled. This is not £2500 good enough. I think that is a perfectly fair and reasonable sentiment.

I would be quite keen on reading the reasoning from anyone who disagrees. ie:- "I read the description of the electric pianos and if you look carefully, it clearly states they are models based on, not direct samples"

So, at some point, cue proper samples with all the real-deal (I wonder if Clavia will note the previous ones were rubbish) which will probbaly also be huge.

I don't think it's unreasonable to be upset to the tune of not buying the real instruments, because the product you chose to buy purported (to the normal person reading the description) to be an excellent, thoroughly detailed clone of the original turned out to be something else.

Put it this way, when I bought my Clavinova all those years ago, their equally wide of the mark Rhodes didn't purport to be one they had in the workshop which had been set up as such.

As they say, perhaps my sentiment isn't very nice, but please don't shoot the messenger.

jazzystu wrote:I do think Nord are amazing but in this case, I am merely irritated by the fact that they appear (well, some suggest) the EPs are partially stretched and modelled

All the Nord pianos until the XL have always been stretched. All the Nord pianos, including the XL, are looped rather than fully sampled (as is every piano in every other keyboard, except for Korg Kronos and Krome which sample the full length, and numerous Roland SuperNatural which samples only a portion and then models the rest). And not a single keyboard samples a piano at every single velocity that the human hand is capable of triggering a real piano at. Nor every possible resonance. All samples are incomplete simulations and always have been. Honestly, I find the "violation of trade description" premise pretty ridiculous.

Where did you get the impression that Nord uses modeling? I've never heard that. Since modeling is a way to get more realistic characteristics from a smaller amount of sample data, it might be cool if they did, but I don't think they do. Roland does it with SuperNATURAL pianos (FP series, RD series, Jupiter, Integra), Yamaha does it with the SCM pianos (CP1/5/50), and Korg does it with their EPs (but not APs) in the Kronos, but I don't think Nord does it anywhere in their pianos.

But as I've said before, if someone really needs better EPs, get them elsewhere, don't wait for Nord. Even if Nord comes out with a couple of 200 mb EPs tomorrow, they still may not be to your taste! And there are plenty of good EPs you can get in computer VSTs, sound modules, and other keyboards that you can trigger from your Nord today. It's great that Nord keeps coming out with updates, but you should make sure a board has the sounds you need out of the of the box on the day you buy it, because there are never any guarantees about the future. If you bought a Nord for its EPs and you don't like them, then you didn't properly eval the board before you bought it.

Scott, your last point brought up a thought. When I bought my Rhodes Mark I Stage in 1978, it was voiced a certain way, had a specific action and a specific sound. I owned that piano for a lot of years, and spent a lot of time tweaking it to sound the way I wanted. Much of that effort was adjusting the tines and pickups, but it only got me so far. The rest of the sound customization was through outboard effects: phaser, chorus, distortion and amplification. The action was something I was "stuck" with, and had to learn to play the instrument so it sang when I wanted it, and barked when it was appropriate. Bottom line, though, was that we bought ONE instrument and had to work with how it sounded. I got what I got, and had to tweak it to make it mine.

Nord offers six different Rhodes samples today, all with pretty different characteristics. That is six times the choice I had with my Mark I. I chose to keep both Mk I models and the Brite Tines samples in my Electro, as I find they suit my playing and style of music the best. The Mk I Suitcase reminds me a lot of my old Rhodes. From that point, I've worked with the EQ and effects to get several very usable, musical and playable patches, using the same approach I had with my old Rhodes: I got what I got, now tweak it to make it mine. IMHO, the EP samples that Nord has provided are great starting points.

Another factor to me is that, regardless of manufacturer, a lot of the nuance and subtleties debated here tend to get buried in the mix of a band anyway. A lot of folks here play rock or pop, where most of this stuff is lost in the overall sound. Not to sound insulting, but we are the only ones listening for that nuance, and nobody else. Case in point is the Long Release feature; it is such a subtle effect that it's very often hard to hear even when we play solo piano.

We can debate the technologies and specifics of each manufacturer's approach, but ultimately we need to decide if we are inspired to make music.

Amen to that.

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