Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards NAMM 2013 thread

Yes, it does sound good, but how many uprights do most gigging players actually play? Uprights were a compromise solution for those households with insufficient space for a grand. The clamor has been for new, bigger, more detailed electric piano samples - to compete with Korg and Yamaha; and yet Clavia has apparently turned one very deaf ear to that request, so far.

Who says everyone is a gigging player? I fit into the household niche myself and like to have a variety of thing s to play...

The Nord upright Tomas is demoing in that vid sounds much better there then it did on the phones. Surprisingly Nord wasn't using the Beyer (770s or 880s can't remember which) phones like in the past. They were Sennheiser, but kinda Bb ones.

I personally I have little to no use for uprights so they are the first thing to go from my NP2 when deleting stuff to free up memory for the larger XL piano samples. That said, the new upright sounded good...if you like uprights.

Can't say I played everything related to *new* at NAMM, but out of everything I did play, nothing made me want to go out Monday, sell the Nord and switch gears, upgrade or.... downgrade, as is the case more often today.

Also surprisingly there were no Krome 88s out for the public to check out. And yes, quite disappointing there was nothing new from Yamaha, specifically in the CP5 or S90/Motif department.

I can see that, but I think the Roland will actually be heavier than the Casio, and with the control panel on the left, maybe not all that much narrower, either. Meanwhile, the Casio functionality looks very impressive, and I really like their new action.

Yes, I wondered whether I should have said that...

However, my point is that most Nord boards are designed for gigging. There will always be a percentage of players who like and buy them exclusively for home use, but there are a number of DPs with much better action that are more suited to home use where weight is not a factor.

I don't think there's a problem with wanting to have a variety of options in piano samples, but if you read the Nord Forums you'll find threads dedicated to asking Nord to improve their electric piano samples.

Yeah Nord's defintley going to have to get on the ball now, with regard to updated rhodes and wurlis, after hearing what the new Casio has to offer in that area under a grand.

Again personally, the Nord EPs work fine for me now as they are. I'm not as discriminating in that area as a lot of people that buy Nords are. On the other hand, something new and better is always welcome.

Dave would you care to give an opinion on the Casio? Did you get to play it?

Vox,
Hehe.....

Yeah I saw that over there too... Honestly Im lucky I can play chop sticks right now. Even for home use while the action may be different than Kawai or Roland (good is subjective so Im not going there) I love the idea of having access to their library and updates to it. Right now I am waiting on the new shipment from Nord due in at the end of February. (the new model, whatever that means) With that said, the new Kawai VPC has raised my eyebrows for sure.

voxpops, the Petrof 'Black' upright is currently my 'go to' piano sound on my Nord. I love it for 60's New Orleans-style tunes, where using a grand piano can feel strange.

I definitely agree that some new EPs/Wurlies would be welcome though.

Cheers,
James
x

The Numa Concert has a tri-sensor action - is this the first Fatar action to have that? Good stuff, anyhow.

Greg.

Width difference looks to be about 8 inches; Roland appears to be about 4 lbs. heavier.

James, I'm also using one of the Krome's uprights for certain tunes. I can't remember how many uprights Nord has, but I'm pretty sure it's at least five or six - how many more would one want before getting just one new Wurli?

Actually, I'm only going on about all this because it's possible there could be something red inbound soon...

You know, the weight of the Numa Concert with wooden keys is around 45lbs. Couple that with 1GB for AP samples, properly implemented resonance (I hope), and the tri-sensor action, and I might be tempted. There were a lot of things that were very good about the Numa Piano, but Studiologic are going to have to up their game in the areas of quality control, software debugging, and user support.

Yeah, good point. But additional sounds are always welcome in my book.



Back on the Christmas card list?

James
x

We'll see...

Well, we've got our new $1,000,000,000 (propert tax hike anyone??) convention center opening up just in time for Summer NAMM ths year here in Nashville, so maybe that'll be more exciting than Winter NAMM... I think this is endemic of the overall economic malaise plaguing the industry. It seems the manufacturers are being very conservative with their R&D.

As far as the Nord stuff, we would definitely welcome newer and better EP samples. I think Nord is ahead of the game in the Acoustic Piano world, and their whole free updating approach will keep me plenty satisfied sticking with their products.

I did not get to play the PX-5. Nor did I get to hear Joe Sample live unfortunately playing the Wurl sound. Me and another fellow from KC got an impromtu demo in an iso booth off to the side from another longtime KC member. The little I heard, more in the synth area, was inconclusive, simply because I'm not a "synth guy". Much of that stuff is lost on someone like me. It's definitely an instrument still in the making imo. They scrambled to just get a few of the sounds playable for NAMM.

I was told the pianos are improved from the 350. Also from Mike Martin's and Joe Sample's demo video, it's pretty obvious the EPs are as well. I'm sure they will be working very hard to pull of this together to meet promised shipping dates in early spring. I'm sure the PX-5 will be a monster ! Personally I hope too much QC is not overlooked in the process.

Thanks, Dave!

Don't vist Sweden without checking with your local PW travel agency. I could possibly save you some green on the red.

I just finished another day of NAMM and here are some things I feel were very interesting.

Casio PX-5S

I know this keyboard has been talked about a lot on the forums already, but I do have to say it sounded amazing to my ears, especially the new electric pianos. They were headphones to use while listening to the demo and everything sounded wonderful. The quality of the different electric pianos, clavs, synths, and obviously the acoustic piano was higher than anything I would have expected from Casio. I use to own an older casio workstation keyboard and would always dream for something better, but now I dream for this instrument lol.

Best video I found that actually was recording direct from the keybaord.



Yamaha SH Silent Piano *CFX Sampled Piano

I wasn't aware Yamaha had updated there silent pianos but the sound of the sampled piano was amazing. The sign next to the piano said that the silent system uses new samples from the CFX Grand and was recorded using binaural recording techniques.
I thought it sounded wonderful. Much better than any other digital piano I heard from Yamaha. I hope that they start putting these samples in upcoming DPs.

Here's a video from Yamaha's youtube channel.



*also I checked the Yamaha NU1 who's sign also said it used CFX samples, but did not mention anything about binuaral recording.

Ivory American Concert D w/ Kawai VPC

Both the Ivory booth and Kawai booth had this setup. The combination of these two products was just amazing. The keyboard on the VPC felt very similar to the Kawai grand we have in our rehearsal room at church. And it was a joy to play with the American Concert D. The resonances on the American Concert D were also sounded very realistic. Notes that should cause other strings to resonate did just that. The demonstrator at the Ivory booth was running it on a Macbook pro and told me he could get up to 700 voice-polyphony. That seemed like a lot of notes, but maybe more than one sample is triggered when playing a not on Ivory.


Anyways, those are just a few things that peeked my interest at NAMM.