Nord User Forum

For the past 9 years I’ ve been using a Nord Electro 3 on stage, in association with a keyboard for piano and sinth sounds. Since I own a Hammond C3 (which I no longer carry around due to the weight), I really miss a 2 manual organ.
I have sometimes thought of a Hammond skx since it has an extra voice section, but honestly it has very poor organ sounds in my opinion. Nord Electro surpasses this by a lot. Now I wonder why Clavia doesn't produce a C2d with piano voices plus a few extras ! Hoping that our fantastic swedish friends don't decide to leave the C2.

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Hi Meggia, I really understand what you mean.
But please be aware: The newer Nords are not always the better Nords!
I have a hammond, too and I had (4 times) a hammond sk1. (btw: In combination with a neo-ventilator the hammond sounds great)
And I changed my Nord Electro 5d with a Stage3-compact. Result: the organ sounds worse and the leslie-sim sometimes sounds like a vibrato.
The electro-sound had been warmer and I had to improve the hammond-sounds in the stage3 for a long time.
So please expect no wonder if a newer Nord-Organ would be offered!
I would look for a piano-midi-module or perhaps an iPad/iPhone-app.

Thanks Hlaalu for pointing me to the right topic. As expected, no one knows what the future of C2D may be. For sure a Nord Electro dual manual could solve these problems too. Science fiction ? Perhaps Clavia has no interest in such a solution.
Thanks Eibinger, I heard a lot of people saying like you :
“the Nord Stage 3 organ sounds worse especially in comparison with the NE6”. This is the reason I haven't bought a Stage 3 yet.
A midi-module could be useful if connected to the NED to get a richer palette of sounds. There remains the question of a 2 manual keyboard ,that a hammond player often cannot do without. Unfortunately, Die Frankfurter Musik Messe will not take place again this year. However, I hope for important news from Clavia.

Maybe not important, but Musikmesse Frankfurt was postponed for October, 22-24, not cancelled.

Thanks Fziegler for the news. Right now I'm reading that this event will take place in parallel with the international Buchmesse. Finally an awakening of culture and commerce after the Covid-induced lockdown. Since we will all be vaccinated, Clavia will certainly celebrate this return to normal life with a new release.

Meggia wrote:For the past 9 years I’ ve been using a Nord Electro 3 on stage, in association with a keyboard for piano and sinth sounds. Since I own a Hammond C3 (which I no longer carry around due to the weight), I really miss a 2 manual organ.

A possible solution...
This is much lighter to carry around than a dual-manual would be, and the keys are almost as close to each other as they are on a dual manual. That's a Vox Continental on bottom, with most of its controls covered, since for this kind of use, you don't need access to those controls during live performance. There are rubber stoppers under the front of the Nord, so that the Nord's weight doesn't rest directly on the controls of the Vox so as not to risk damaging them. I did leave just the very lowest part of the Vox's top panel accessible, just for patch recall. I've set up those buttons to be able to recall the Vox sounds I prefer to the sounds in the Nord (not its organ sounds!), and one button is set up with a silent sound, so all I have to do is hit that button and (since it's a Stage) the Dual KB button on the Nord, and I'm in 2-manual-Nord mode. Getting/adapting the right stand is an important part of it, too. But it does produce a very easily transportable 2-manual Nord, with the additional advantages that the Vox has a particularly nice feeling action, and a bunch of really nice sounds of its own. For example, I like its EPs and brass better than Nord's. And if you were pairing it with an Electro rather than a Stage, it would give you additional functions you don't have in your Nord, like monophonic lead line synth sounds with portamento and a pitch bender. It's a very lightweight board, available as either 61 or 73. There are other lower tiers you could come up with, but I think this is an especially nice one.

Meggia wrote: Since we will all be vaccinated, Clavia will certainly celebrate this return to normal life with a new release.

Not to quench your optimism (and go off topic), but I seriously doubt that by October any significant part of the healthy, sub-60 population will be vaccinated. 2021 will still be a year of waiting and patience and online concerts and trade shows, maybe in 2022...

Regarding the topic of a hypothetical successor of the C2D, I think the area in which Clavia should improve the most to be competitive again in this portion of the market is not so much the core sound of the (Hammond) organ nor how many other EP/AP sounds it will have, but rather the organ engine tweakability, and also not-so-subtle subtleties like the multicontact feeling of the keybed, which are pretty radical changes as compared to the present C2D.

Hammond Suzuki did this with the XK-5 and more recently even with their lower priced SK Pro which among other things has piano sounds and a basic synth in it. Whatever Clavia will come up with, at this point they can't pretend it didn't happen. Yet, I am not sure that implementing any form of multicontact emulation, or redesigning the interface so that such tweakability is easy accessible in the main panel, is something they can come up with in just a few months from now.

Speaking of tweakability, for example the XK-5 lets you program how much leakage from which weel into which one... each by each. Or how much key click (attack click AND release click) you want for each contact of each key. OK it may well be exaggerated for most people, but the huge advantage of such big tweaking scope is that no two of them will be the same after some customisation, and this, at the moment, isn't true for the organs found in Nords, which, however good, all sound exactly the same for a given model.

Now things like wheel-by-wheel customisation would require heavy menu diving and this surely isn't appealing for Nord enthusiasts. Some may as well say that such a fine-grained customisation is not even the point of a good clone. And I'd say fair enough if it weren't for the fact that any hypothetical successor of the C2D is going to cost at least 2,500, and considering how the market has been elvoving in the last years it's going to be increasingly difficult to find someone willing to pay that much for an organ with much less tweaking possibilities than others and without a multicontact emulation. What would it have to have to justify the absence of the above? A killer core sound? Except that the core sound is already pretty much there and not too dissimilar from the other top end clones, in my opinion. Not easy to come up with a forward leap in the core sound itself so huge that it would, alone, sell the thing.

I do hope they are trying to catch up with the rest of the market in all the other aspects, but if they are, it's going to take a bit of time. If they are not, and they'll come up with a only marginally improved C3(?), then I don't know how much attention they can expect from customers... The scariest alternative is that they have decided, for now, to stay outside of this portion of the market altogether...

Nord has never been about maximum tweakability, and I don't see that changing. A multi-contact emulation could be feasible. But I don't know how many people will pick a Hammond over a Nord (or Mojo or Viscount) for that alone. BTW, the cheapest 2-manual Hammond with multi-contact is the XK5+XLK5, totalling $4900 and weighing quite a bit as well. I expect that they will put the multi-contact feature in a more portable and lower cost 2-manual board at some point, but who knows when, or what it will cost.