Nord User Forum

Has anyone had a chance to go through the preset packs clavia has up for the NL4? Are they better than the stock presets?

Whether 3rd party patches are better than the stock presets is a matter of your own taste and preference and what genre of music you do.

A Lot of people frown over synth factory preloads but in every synth you use in amongst the less useful patches you'll find a vast amount of useful ones.I've never understood why people automatically find factory sounds less gratifying or less inspirational than 3rd party sounds,

The Nord leads interface already invites you into your own sound experiments and accidents and theres enough tweaking ability there for both a novice and pro tweaker to be happy,most 3rd party sounds are usually geared towards a certain genre many of which never fit my own sound preference your music genre and style might be catered for with 3rd party sounds

Those patches are free so its a case of downloading them to your synth and audition them to see if there is anything you find inspirational and useful for your own creations.

I agree, sometimes factory patches can be really good, and sometimes not. I think the general resentment towards factory patches stem from the fact that for some machines, the factory patches are hastily scrambled together in order to get the machine out of the door, so seen as an average across the whole market, factory patches will be below par. Aftermarket patch sets will tend to be better as their only reason for existance is to be good.

In the case of the NL4, when browsing through the factory patches, I found that a lot of them just try to show off how weird the synth can sound, at least to my ears.