nord stage needs a Synth for Horns, Strings

[mosSoytenly]

Looking for ideas for a small (<40 keys), simple synth (not a controller) with good samps of horns and strings. I have an old Alesis Q8 but rather not drag that thing around. Looking for light and simple. Suggestions welcome

[AnotherScott]

Korg MicroX -- not state of the art these days, but not bad, Triton calibre sounds.

 

But since the Nord Stage functions well as a zoned MIDI controller, it's a nice piece to just add a module to, that's one of the strengths of the Stage, external sounds integrate so easily into its internal setups. So then you have more to choose from. Maybe a Yamaha Motif rack, or a Roland Sonic Cell (perhaps with an SRX epansion card or two). Or if you like your Alesis sounds, you could look for a QSR.

 

[Sven Golly]

Korg Microstation, if you can deal with small-sized keys.

[AnotherScott]

Well, at not too much bigger than the Microstation, you could also look at the 49-key Nord Wave. And if you don't like it's horn and string samples, you can load your own... of course you haven't said anything about budget here...

[Tobias Åslund]

I would go for a Korg - the Wave is nice, but it doesn't do velocity switching of samples. Also it costs way more than any of the Korg mentioned. I have the Micro-X and it's a great compliment to my Electro 3 - nice strings, brass, and expressive orchestral layers. Also - it allows you to zone an external keyboard in up to 8 zones.

[yannis D]

Roland Juno G, simple, light, cheap, has all nice basic sounds (pads, orchestral, synths, accordions, strings etc), decent piano and rhodes and bad hammonds (but you got this one in your Stage anyway). Sampling option is a plus. Of course is 61 keys not 49 or less, but it's really light

[AnotherScott]

I would go for a Korg - the Wave is nice, but it doesn't do velocity switching of samples.

You can get a kind of velocity switching by setting up 2 sounds (slot A and slot B) and setting up Velocity as a morph function between the volumes of the two slots.

 

I have the Micro-X and it's a great compliment to my Electro 3 - nice strings, brass, and expressive orchestral layers. Also - it allows you to zone an external keyboard in up to 8 zones.

I never thought about that! I recently picked up the similarly functional TR keyboard (which I actually have hardly used). I knew that you could split its internal keyboard into up to 8 zones, and that each zone could trigger an internal sound or a sound on an external MIDI device, but I hadn't thought about zoning external keyboards. With 76 keys on my TR, it wasn't a direction I had thought about. But as I'm thinking about it now, it seems to me that it could actually be set up so that the the zones themselves are assigned across the different keyboards, so you could use the TR (or Micro-X) to assign any combination of up to 8 sounds (from its internal sound bank or from attached modules) to any range of either its own keyboard or a second attached keyboard. Very cool, something I'll have to play with!

 

Back to the original topic, one more small (though not quite <40) key keyboard with some decent ROMpler style sounds would be the E-Mu Shortboard.

[Sam Mullins]

I haven't played one, but if I was looking for a light second tier keyboard, I would try the Korg PS60. I think the ease of use (splits, levels, etc) and weight (10 pounds) would make it an appealing option for live use. Don't know how good the horn/string sounds are, but it does have dedicated buttons for both those categories.

 

[AnotherScott]

I haven't played one, but if I was looking for a light second tier keyboard, I would try the Korg PS60.

You allude to a good point, we don't really know why the OP is saying <40 keys. Is it a weight issue? A length issue? Something else?