Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Nord Piano keyboard vs. Nord Stage 2 keyboard.

I think that would be an over-statement. The Nord action is not the best piano action, but it's certainly not the worst either. I would certainly not say it would be impossible to learn to play on one. I've had students who started learning to play on worse.

Yeah good suggestions anotherscott. I agree.

North, yeah the NP88 is definitely adequate for casual piano playing technique wise no doubt and no it's not impossible by any means to learn to play piano on the NP88. I started learning piano on a 61 key Roland synth. But I wouldn't want to develop technique on the NP88. It's no knock on the NP88 either, btw, as Nord wasn't trying to emulate a grand piano action, but just a good solid action for piano playing in a lightweight package. I love mine, and it's perfect for the gigging piano player. But the reason I forked out the money for the N1 is because I need an acoustic action. Have you played the NP88 or Stage 2? If you haven't you should, and play others as well, because impressions in person are always different than listening to samples online.

I have a Nord Electro 3 (that has pretty much the same sounds as the Nord Piano, just a bit smaller memory) and a Roland RD700NX.

I am post the "just got this and it is better than everything else" stage :-) So I can honestly say that all of the 3 you mention have their pro's and con's.

Between the NP88 (or NS2), CP5 and RD700NX, I'd say the RD700NX has the most piano-like action and plays really well. The piano sounds are less "Roland'ish" than what they used to -- and that comes from a guy that played a Yamaha board for years as I hated the Roland piano sound... In fact, they sound really good and rich, and are just a tad less sensitive to bad amplification than the Nord sounds, which needs good amplification and careful EQ (as a real piano does). The e-piano sounds are tweakable and useable, but I like the Nord e-pianos better.

The Nord is very enjoyable and playable. If I should only get one board that could do piano, e-piano and organ, I'd get the NS2. But the keyboard is a compromise and not as good for piano playing as the RD700NX or the CP5. If I wanted mainly a piano board, I'd get the RD700NX. If I wanted only an e-piano, I'd get the Nord (or the CP5). The Nord is really very very good for e-piano playing! Just for completion: if I wanted only organ, it would obviously be a Nord (C2 or Electro 3).

The Nord pianos are very good and varied. Nevertheless, they suffer a bit from the stretched sample set (also the XL ones), and some of them have a slightly "boxy" sound. The boards without the long release have a slightly "harpsichordy" sound to them as well -- that was one of the key points for me not getting the NP88, which lacks the long release.

The CP5 is very good for e-piano; better than the RD700NX for that, but not better than the Nord; just different. I happen to like the Nord e-piano's a lot -- all the Yamaha's have their "signature" sound for (e-)piano as well, and are easily recognisable in a song when you have heard the sound a lot, like the old Roland acoustic pianoes were.

But the Nord e-piano samples are also quite small, and even if I find them excellent and have a slight preference vs. the Yamaha's, they also have their shortcomings (try to play e.g. rootless 4-voice chords and see how easily you can hear the individual tones -- or try how easy it is to control going from soft to barking sounds and how many gradations you can get).

The action on the CP5 is pretty good, but the piano on the CP5 is less "full" than the two others. It is very good in a mix or for fast jazz-lines, but it does not have the same kind of body or sustain that both the RD700NX and the Nords have. Sometimes this is an advantage, though. But after spending some 6+ hours going between the RD700NX and the CP5, I picked the RD700NX to complement the Electro 3. Others would probably pick the CP5 :-)

Anyway, it sounds to me as if you have already made up your mind on a Nord product, and indeed they are very good. So I don't want to discourage you, just say that all of those mentioned are compromises one way or the other -- the Nord is a very good compromise, but not perfect. I can pick between the Nord and the Roland RD700NX sounds for acoustic piano when I bring both boards and MIDI them together, and I usually pick the Roland SN sound for my playing. For most e-pianos and always for organs, I pick the Nord sounds.

At the end of the day, all 3 (or 4): NP88 (NS2), CP5 and RD700NX, are really excellent products and just so much better than what you could get 8-10 years ago!


... I think I have said most of this also previously in other threads or PM's, so sorry for the repetition. Just wanted to put this "update" here after having spent some more time with my selections :-)


-- Per.

That's a very accurate summation of all those keyboards Per.

The sound and action is so subjective on all these, you really have to find the one that fits your style of music and playing the best. Each one has its strong points and compromises.

I tried to play the Nord Piano 88 very briefly, but I have not yet seen the Stage 2 in shops around here.

I might go to Copenhagen - Denmark by the end of next week, and I think there is one shop that have it on display, so I can try it out.

did any one have experience with these stands:

http://www.thomann.de/de/clavia_nord_stage_keyboard_stand.htm

http://www.thomann.de/de/km_18953.htm

Best regards

well, thank you again for all contributions, not least to Per for his comprehensive summation of the various keyboards.

All the digital pianos have imperfections, so, I think Dave Ferris says it pretty well:

"The sound and action is so subjective on all these, you really have to find the one that fits your style of music and playing the best. Each one has its strong points and compromises."

And in this process it is very nice to have this forum, whose members are very knowledgable.

Best regards.

Found this nosing around for NS2 demos. Very nice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdkpmgdCLZg

I found the same video last night, indeed very nice.

Now, if you did not watch this video in HD - 720p yet, try to view it in it's default 360p solution (and not full screen) and just listen to the music.

Question to the trained ears:

Can you hear, if the long release (mentioned earlier by anotherscott and Per Baekgaard) is switched on on the piano sounds ?

Best regards

I am just going through similar choices.

I just bought a stage 2 (revision b) and after a week I was so unhappy with the sounds that it went back.

I want to say up front that I am not a keyboard player, I play sax mainly and have a decent studio with things like TruePianos, Omnisphere, Absynth, NI B4. I have lots of Piano VSTs over the years from NI, Steinberg and a host of stuff with Kontakt and Halion - old school now. I have been using TruePianos Diamond module as my goto.

For the last four years I have been hot-housing myself on keys, playing 3-15 hrs a day - some physical problems preventing me playing the sax.

I also owned an early KeyB which I sold to get the Stage 2. I have a nord electro 2 also.

I play jazz and rock.


I know little about touch for the piano - so I can't deal with this perspective. I learnt piano on waterfall keys mostly (oops!)

I was very eager to get the Stage 2. When I got it home and plugged it into the studio I dowloaded the XL sizes of the pianos and then plugged in the MIDI to my studio.
I was hoping for one excellent piano which I could grow to love. I found a mass of compromises. The keyboard is very well built and the interface is amazingly thoughtful for an all rounder, but the sounds, none of them satisfied me, with the possible expetion of the organs. I think this is due to the lack of disk space, there is simply too many instruments crammed in to too little disk space, IMO.

The Synth section
I own some good VST synths my favorites being Absynth and Omnisphere. I was hoping that, with the addition of the ability to use samples, I would hear Omni like sounds, but what I found was cheesy eighties disco type sounds. Auditioning the synth samples they all seemed to be not of high quality - especially the vox samples - sounding like frebbies from an old computer mag. I think they were all sixteen bit? Maybe you could get this going with some better samples and some work of your own.

The Piano section:
Again, I am not an expert, and it must be said that this is a stage piano and what I was looking for was perhaps a studio type emulation, but I found compromises everywhere. For a start the whole idea of having small medium and large samples is a compromise there can be no doubt about that. The biggest XL grand comes in at 198 megabytes. By comparison the largest offering on the planet is VLS's gigantic offering the Imperial - at 60 gigabytes I make that 700 times larger. Ivory II is 22 gig. I know we are talking flash memory, (and yes there is the question of load up times) but half a gig? For everything?
I wonder how many seperate samples have been used, how many layers, how compressed the sounds were, were the samnples lossy? After playing for hours every day for a week the Stage had to go for this reason alone - the painos. I did not need a synth so this was not part of the equation.

Aurally I could not get on with the paino sounds and found it to be synthy in direct comparison to the TruePianos Diamond Module http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsd2SJThgjU. Touch wise, from my non expert perspective, the keyboard of the Nord seemed to come alive with the TruePiano (which is also small and cantradicts my hypothesis) as soon as I switch back to the Audio coming from the Nord, the keyboard felt singlificantly less vivacious and things like trills became hard work.

The Organ section
For me the best part. until the week before I had had a KeyB mark 1. I also used the B4 VST. I like the B4 for its wide range of cabinet emulations and for its presets. On occasions I used my Nord Electro.
The Hammond on the Nord Stage 2 is well laid out, I would have preferred some kiond of rocker switches to the 'drawbuttons' which arent grabable. I can see Nords point in not using sliders (as the presets would not be reflected when selected), but a rocker switch could be better I think.
Aurally its difficult to compare one Hammond to another as various settings have to be spot on to make the comparison. I have never owned a real Hammond, but I would guess that each beast has its own personality anyways. I ran quite a few tests and found the Hammond sounds to be good but thinner that the other organs I have. This was not too bad, as there were plenty of ways of compensating for this.

The Leslie emulation was quite good as well, certainly useable, I found the fast speed of the Leslie to be faster than I was used to. I search for a setting to slow it down but did not find one, I did find a setting to differ the acceleration speed from slow to fast - the brake speed.
On the Nord Stage 2 there are some different Hammond organs, I selected each one but did not find any marked difference. I only spent five minutes on this ands its possible that I did not discover the right attributes.
I did like the Vox and Farfisa which were to my untutored ears very good. The fact that the organ interfaced provided a close emulation of the original controls, brought tghe epxerience from being two dimensional to three dimensional. I have never owned either of these organs but I found the epxeirence of using them to creat Door's like runs very rewarding.

My conclusions

For me the synth was unremarkable - especially the preloaded examples - nothing exceptional at all. The Pianos I could not live with, they may be all right for cutting through the mix of a rock band ( I would rather have something better) but in the studio (OK its not what its designed for) I could not use it for either practice or for recording. If the Stage 2 had stayed in my studio, then it would have been a MIDI controller for TruePianos.

I think I am going to end up with a Nord C2 for organ sounds and a dedicated stage paino sound as the Roland RD700x or a Yamaha CP1.

If anyone want to recoomend anything else I would appreciate it.

Zero

ZeroZero, sorry to hear of your disappointment. I was on a seemingly never ending pursuit of a great sounding, great playing, lightweight flexible professional keyboard to gig. Over the years I've had the P80, CP300 (not lightweight), RD-700GXF, RD-300GX, RD-700NX, and now the Nord Piano. The Nord's pianos took a little while to get used to, as did the action (esp coming from the RD-700GXF/RD-700NX). But I've found through my own ears, and through countless compliments from FOH engineers, and engineers in the studio recording the NP88, that it's an amazing sounding keyboard. Nord's acoustic pianos and electric pianos combined with the string/sympathetic resonance and pedal modeling are the best sounding of any keyboard I've had both live and in the studio. The action, while a compromise and the only debatable weakness to me that the NP88 has is still quite good and very responsive. Granted it's no action to build solid technique on, but it's still great for it's intended purpose.

I'm coming in on my 3rd week owning the AvantGrand N1, and I can say without a doubt the Nord's pianos sound better by a long shot with headphones. I hooked up my NP88 to my AG N1 and was blown away all over again with the Nord's pianos. They're so alive and organic sounding. Of course the story changes when you play the AG through its own speakers, which thus takes advantage of the Spatial Acoustic Sampling methods Yamaha used when recording the AG samples...you only get a stereo image from the AG with headphones which is why it loses much of its fidelity IMHO.

The bottom line is that, the sound and feel of these things is so subjective, but the Nord's AP and EP sounds with the details and imperfections are the most authentic and playable samples I've ever heard in a DP. Everything else sound bland and boring after a small amount of time. I would highly highly highly recommend either the NP88 or NS2.

Side note, but I played the NP88 for a gig this morning, and I haven't played it about three weeks, other than hooking it up to the AG once, (not been gigging much lately) and it was so fun to play. I actually really appreciate and enjoyed the action, which I've been on record before as not caring too much for it. After spending a lot of time behind a real grand piano action, I actually found the NP88 action quite responsive and quite enjoyable to play. It reaffirmed my adoration of the Nords!

ZeroZero I would recommend the RD-700NX if you're looking for a solid piano, but the CP5 IMHO would work better live. To my ears, much of the warmth and detail in the SuperNATURAL pianos of the Roland disappear in a live mix, esp if you're playing rock and jazz. Those are genres of music where the Yamaha sound really shines.

Zachary, I would like to ask you:
You have the Nord piano and you did try out the Stage 2.

Per Baekgaard described the difference in sound of the Nord Piano and the Stage 2 this way:

"The Nord pianos are very good and varied. Nevertheless, they suffer a bit from the stretched sample set (also the XL ones), and some of them have a slightly "boxy" sound. The boards without the long release have a slightly "harpsichordy" sound to them as well -- that was one of the key points for me not getting the NP88, which lacks the long release."

what do you think of the effect of the "long release" on the Stage 2, which you do not have on the Nord Piano?

Best regards

Reason for edit:
One more question:
I have been thinking of this question for some time, but forgot to ask, here it goes:
In the Nord piano and Stage 2 specs it says: "40-60 Voices Polyphony"
That is not much compared to most other DP's, and yet I don't see any complaints about 'note stealing', can you explain that ?

Just to hit a rare point of disagreement with you Zach, but having owned one I should add that I would only find the CP5 OK for live work if I was going out in stereo. It has no mono piano sounds and in my experience, there's no way to get a decent sound out of it running just one channel.

This is another important score for the Nord, which has a dedicated "mono output" switch and sounds excellent with just one lead coming out of it.

As for the polyphony thing, I worried and wondered about that too before I bought the Nord. But I've never noticed any note stealing.

The other thing which has been brought home to me several times on recent gigs is how important it is to carefully and subtly employ the Nord's EQ, particularly the sweepable mid. For example, only recently I've learned to back off the mids slightly in the Bosie sample to make the sound a little more even and less "doinky" in the octave above middle C.

aidan, the Electro 3 has a Mono button also. Do you know if it's still necessary to enable this when connecting just the left/mono output?

Ah, and Is the same true when playing EPs and organs?

Cheers,
James
x

Of all the two times I've played the Stage 2, I didn't notice a major discernible difference in the sound. I think the only time when the LR feature is of added benefit would be solo piano recordings, or maybe an intimate solo piano type performance.

Polyphony isn't a problem at all with the NP88. I think Nord probably calculates their polyphony by the stereo voices, so it's cut down by half. So instead of 80-120 voices, the NP88 has 40-60. That's a guess, but I've had no note stealing on the NP88.



I agree that the Nord to my ears works better live than the CP5, but it didn't for Dave Ferris. The mono feature is a nice feature to have, but I most always go out stereo anyway so don't use it much. I was speaking strictly from experience using the Roland RD-700GX/GXF live and didn't find the sounds to cut through well at all. The nice details in the SN voices were gone through a PA, and it sounded really processed when I tried to record it. I was disappointed with the SN sound outside of headphones or through studio monitors.