Where could Nord go from here?

[Lewthepianoguy]

OK, this post might sound a bit puzzling, but don't worry... allow me to put this to you as I'd love others feed back here.

My background is as a classical / session pianist and church organist, As an organist, workstation keyboards really do let me down from a pipe organ perspective.

I find the stage 3 from the sampling aspect, a "near best" example of a decent church / cathedral organ, however... The "Pipe Organ Modelling" is not what it should be and to be honest is a gimmick I won't use, so it's a feature that's not used. The problem is this with regards pipe organ modelling, it's all wrong. You don't use drawbars to bring in harmonic partials in volumes, that's not how a church organ works. Stops are their own voices and ranks of pipes are each stop to a voice, so an 8' strings is a voice, layering other stops creates a mixture. This organ modelling just doesn't help. I do wish that nord considered bringing over the pipe organ section into the stage 3 and expand it. I can think of a few ways around this, one consists of taking samples of varous used organ stops and creating nsmp instruments with layers, etc for the sample synth portion, the other is an extensive rebuild of the organ module for the stage 3 to include a pipe organ which utilises it's own sampling section to call up a number of stops per panel, etc to really give a true organ behaviour where possible.

Please understand that I am not "nit picking" but it's time to start examining the basis behind the nord stage and nord piano, etc as to potential evolution.

Considering that the Stage 3 and Piano 4 are basically open samplers with a replaceable instrument list and sample storage, It's time to examine the true basis of what these instruments could become. I'm surprised that it's not been considered by Nord over a period of time, hence the kind of incremental developments we see now.

Take the Piano 4, 1GB storage... Really? It's a piano with 120 note poly. Ideally let's see the Piano 4 with 256 note poly with 4GB or more storage, after all' it's a piano, which itself should be able to handle the XL instruments of all libraries and still offer more besides.

The Stage 3 on the same basis as the Piano 4, let's examine not just the Piano storage but also the sample synth storage. Why still 480mb for a stage 3? that's daft. 2GB more like, should be ideal, if not more. Also the polyphony should near match the piano module, nothing worse than running the synth / sample engine to find voice stealing.

I am concerned in part over the lack of Rack modules, all of a sudden the lead A1 and 4 racks disappearing. There are customers who want rack modules as well to expand upon, rather than heavy keyboards and more cases than you can shake a stick at.

At some point, I'm sure comments were made regarding Rack versions of the stage series and the thoughts that it wasn't viable. Well, actually, this is viable as an 8U configuration. you can still offer full tactile support in a 19" 8U module or slightly larger.

My last comment here before someone stands behind me with a sheep's crook...

The Nord C2D, a sexy 2 manual organ primarily used as a B3 / C3 organ, etc, which has a scaled down version of a church organ setup, it would be nice to bring nord into the classical era a bit and upgrad the C2D. OK excuse madness here for a bit, but this is perfectly viable.

A 3 manual 61 note unit which encompasses the C2D's drawbar and other functions, but also switches over to a full blown 3 manual church organ by adding what I call compact tab switches to an extension of the left side of the organ to call up a per manual setup of different stops, registration memories, etc. This would bring a rather unique concept organ on to the market. there's a few organists like me who either own or have used the C2D for church use and love these, but it's time to expand.

OK, my thoughts aside, OVER TO YOU GUYS! Share this with Nord if you like, the more who do, the more will encourage Nord to thin further into what we need. We're the customers / end users here, we're the ones spending good money here, so let's show Nord we love them, but it's time to open new doors.

[Gambold]

Any new direction takes a lot of time and money - and there has to be a profit in the end. We can suggest all sort of things (and have) but Clavia is not a huge company with dozens of lines. They are a boutique builder and likely have high production costs.

That said, we can dream. I wouldn't mind seeing a "Stage Junior" offered at significantly lower cost with basic features but still a Nord in build quality and sound offerings. An entry-level instrument, for newbies to learn their way around basic synthing, while enjoying the B3 and piano library - something Nord doesn't really have. It could have 61 keys, smallish memory to hold a few boards, not as many effects, basic reverb and EQ, digital sliders for the B3, stripped down but good learning synth, etc - and sell for under $1500. Compete directly with the Korg SV-1, yet be a lot lighter and have a much better B3 and acoustic piano selection.

Something that if it got trashed or stolen on the road, your life wouldn't be over. But something that still brings along the basic first third of features that most Nord users probably use 90% of the time. I'd buy one - and if it could talk to my Electro even better, I could port over boards, samples, and presets as needed from my E4 in my basement studio, and use the Stage Junior as a road hog.

[anotherscott]

Take the Piano 4, 1GB storage... Really? It's a piano with 120 note poly. Ideally let's see the Piano 4 with 256 note poly

Do you know anyone who has ever run out of polyphony at 120 on a Nord?

4GB or more storage...also the sample synth storage. Why still 480mb for a stage 3? that's daft. 2GB more like, should be ideal, if not more.

More memory is always nice. How much do you want to pay? (As has been discussed before, the kind of storage Nord uses to do what it does isn't the same as what's in a cheap flash drive.)

[PScooter63]

Hi Lew,

Please forgive me for saying that I found your sigline quote somewhat ironic in view of the content of the post above it. It would surely be very entertaining to have snapshots of our Swedish friends' faces upon reading the suggestion that they produce a 3-manual 61-note organ instrument.

The whole point of Nord's underlying philosophy of providing a front panel with livicated buttons and knobs for any and all live performance parameters is to place these controls conveniently at the fingertips of the performer during performance. Indeed, that's where the STAGE model gets its name; it is intended for stage use. Speaking personally, I am all about using rack modules whenever and wherever possible, but that's simply not a practical idea for the Stage model. Plus, anyone who really, really wants a rack-mount Stage can make one easily enough by chopping up their instrument and having some custom ribbon cabling fabricated.

It is true that the rack versions of Nord rack synths have been discontinued. No fiscally-responsible manufacturer is likely to discontinue a profitable product, at least not until and unless they were ready to introduce a newer replacement product, so one can logically infer that this would not have happened if people in the marketplace had actually been buying them in any meaningful quantities when they were available.

In an age when more and more musicians (and non-musicians) are gravitating towards software solutions for producing audio, hardware makers' overall share of the marketplace will seemingly continue to dwindle. How lovely that there are companies such as Nord, and Moog and Prophet/Sequential/DSI and others, who are still in the business of making instruments which interesting and fun, and who are able to do so at a profit sufficient to sustain them for the next generation of creative designs. Life is too short...

Bless, Pablo

[Spider]

a further note on the memory comments:

When Hans Nordelius first began designing and making hardware, his aim was to make keyboards, but he determined that the hardware available at the time was not sufficiently powerful to handle the design concepts he had at the time. So he made drums instead, sort of "dipping his toes in the water" while waiting for the hardware world to catch up to the software possibilities. Eventually it did and the Nord Lead was born, the original Virtual Analog.

As anotherscott pointed out, there are numerous threads in this forum with detailed discussions regarding the memory size issue. At present a complete RESTORE on a fully loaded NS3 will take...a really long time. An instrument using this memory with 4GB for pianos and 2GB for samples would probably require 8+ hours for this operation. In my book, this is one of the advantages of the NS2 over the NS2EX -- shorter load times due to smaller memory. Eventually, hardware specs will improve, data transfer rates will improve, and some of these things will become more practical. But the time is not yet ripe for that...

[Schorsch]

Something that if it got trashed or stolen on the road, your life wouldn't be over. But something that still brings along the basic first third of features that most Nord users probably use 90% of the time. I'd buy one - and if it could talk to my Electro even better, I could port over boards, samples, and presets as needed from my E4 in my basement studio, and use the Stage Junior as a road hog.

There is always the need to balance chance and risk before doing this ... if they would offer a “Stage Junior” with the top 90% features at less than half of the price it might lead to much less revenue from lots of customers who are prepared to buy the “real Stage”, but on the other hand might increase the number of units beeing sold overall. However, if Clavia is currently managing a stable or even growing revenue level which keeps them profitable with the current product lines they would probably not kill their existing business by adding “low end” products. They are known as a high quality/high price niche player and as such have to make sure they do not dilute their image. And they also have to consider potential investments into their production facilities to cover increased number of units, which has to pay off as well.

By saying this I like the idea of a “Stage junior” or “light” very much, something Yamaha did with the MODX as the light version of the MONTAGE (or the MOXF beeing the light version of the MOTIF before)

[cgrafx]

The issue here going forward is that technology has moved on. Obviously there would need to be a redesign of the architecture, but m.2 SSD storage is blazing fast and could easily be used as primary storage and then transfer everything to RAM. You can easily transfer 8GB of data from SSD to RAM in under 10 seconds.

As an example the Samsung 128GB CM871a SSD M.2 SSD has a read transfer rate of Up to 530 MBps (thats less than 2 seconds per gigabyte). The retail price is $40 for 128GB of storage.

I don't think anybody would complain about waiting 20-25 seconds for the keyboard to boot when the upside is ability to load or save the entire keyboard in minutes instead of hours, not to mention 20x the storage capacity.

[Gambold]

Music companies are like auto companies and are always running behind the times when it comes to interfacing with computer technology. One of my first keyboards was an Ensoniq and it took a 3.5 floppy disk - this in a time when floppies were starting to vanish. My Dodge has a slot for an SA card for my music - this is a 2015 vehicle. I use the bluetooth connection instead.

I'm not as keen on seeing Clavia try to build in "new" computer tech like bluetooth or wireless because I'm pretty sure that anything they put in will either suck from the get-go or get dated quickly. My Crumar Mojo has wireless and you have to leave your network and join its network to see it's really dated menu. This means that your computer is now off the Internet of course. Anyone use the SV-1's Editor? Another journey back in time.

The best thing Clavia can do is make sure their boards will continue to connect to computers and laptops in the fastest way possible. Go to USB-C for starters.

[Rusty Mike]

As an aside, it’s really nice to see you back on the forum Pablo!

I’ll just add the opinion I’ve stated before. I’d like to see a A1/Electro hybrid. Just organ and synth (with the sample library) plus effects, no pianos. 61 or 73 keys SW action with aftertouch.

Otherwise, I’m ok with Nord’s architecture and technology. They will accommodate new technology as it fits their model. Every other manufacturer does this - they’ve been building on their ages old architectures to add features and faster processors. They occasionally incorporate new tech; the Korg Kronos was pretty unique. But Yamaha, Roland, Kurzweil are all just building on their respective architectures.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

[Lewthepianoguy]

I'd just like something a little clear. I'm not on an attack against nord, so there's no need for certain comments. I'm coming from a different standpoint to most musicians here so my comments do have some weight to them. I fully understand how Nord hardware works having owned virtually all nord instruments both new and used in my old studio, so I don't have an issue here.

With regards the first response by pablomastodon, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the tactile UI of the C2D, I've used one and love it. What I'm saying is from a church organist's perspective, as I've worked in churches where original pipe organs have either been decommissioned or in poor playing state here in the UK and there's no funding for a new console or restoration work due to lack of support from the right channels, I have either hired equipment for special occasions or in the days before my studio closure, taken a few pieces of synth gear / samplers with organ setups for the job. This is why, considering a 3 manual version of the C2D could change the way that not only nord sees the C2D from a pipe organ perspective, but also encourages competitors to go forward in this respect, it's doable. I do however believe that in what I discussed there was a degree of translation lost, that's my fault. What I meant was to expand the way in which a pipe organ concept were to work. Most digital church organs are either stop based or rocker switch based tabs to select stops per manual. In this case, I'd be more than happy with the button method of the C2D to select voices per manual, below the control panels for each manual a series of writeable divisional and general piston selections as buttons. all we're talking is an extra 6" length added to a C2D for a left side control panel for pipe organ mode and a 3rd manual. This still means the C2D or as I'd call it a C3T you could use all 3 manuals for a combination of Hammond and Farfisa as an example, maybe a few orchestral samples such as a trumpet, strings, piano, etc.

With reference to AnotherScott's comments of RAM and polyphony. Yes, I've been there with piano polyphony drop off and a few others have as well, I had that with the stage 2 and that crippled me at times. My main concern is more to do with the sample synthesis / synthesis voice allocation and polyphony. There's nothing worse than using a string layer sample with a grand piano to find that 34 voices into it, it chokes and then resets to the next cluster of notes. brings back memories of a kurzweil K2600SX I do miss a heck of a lot.

When backing up and restoring a system, yes, I've been there, try doing that on a Korg OASYS 88. There are ways to improve sample backup and restore or the way in which memory is handled, similar to working with samplers from AKAI like the last known decent sampler, the Z8, sample transfer and restores did take a while, but if you look at today's technologies, those improvements do make a difference. I'm only trying to show where some customers look at the 1GB of Piano storage against the 2GB on the stage 3 and ask Why? where the piano is literally that and as such, could offer further piano instances and unique combinations which the stage offers, same said of the Electro in piano storage, ok the electro is a different workhorse.

As I said, I'm not in any way attacking Nord in their design, I'm just trying to show that there are customers who are looking for solutions to their needs and need to know where Nord stand as developers for their investments in the future. OK perhaps it was late last night when I worded this so I could have said a few things differently, but with that I've obviously opened a few doors people don't like. Sorry about that.