Nord Piano 4

[bjosko]

No info at Nord homepage yet, only at Youtube

 

[video:youtube]

[Tobias Åslund]

http://www.nordkeyboards.com/products/nord-piano-4

[zephonic]

Dayumn, isn't the NP3 just like one year old?

[Spider76]

Wow, that was unexpected!

They were clearly in a hurry to update all their stage piano lineup, so they quickly introduced in the Electro and Piano series all the main improvements of the Stage 3: seamless transitions, crossfade, increased polyphony, piano filters etc.

 

I guess these were all relatively easy things to do, once they worked out things on the NS3.

 

Still waiting for a new synth or organ, though...

[ElmerJFudd]

More polyphony, better performance and an enhanced feel

 

Other highlights include seamless transitions when changing sounds or programs while youre playing, dedicated piano filters and split point crossfades. The sample section, meanwhile, now has 512MB of memory, which is double what you got in the Nord Piano 3.

 

This remains a live-focused keyboard; as well as the piano and sample synth sections, you also get a comprehensive suite of tweakable effects. Its scheduled for release in the summer, with pricing still to be confirmed.

[JWhllr]

1GB of memory is a shame...

[AnotherScott]

 

They were clearly in a hurry to update all their stage piano lineup

It makes sense... They were in a position where--apart from the action--the new Nord Stage was a better piano than the Nord Piano was. Surprising, though, that the NS3 still has more piano memory. (Though f it were up to me, I'd have kept the NS3 piano memory to 1 GB and added brought the synth sample memory up o 1 GB.)

 

I guess these were all relatively easy things to do, once they worked out things on the NS3.

Yeah, they can repurpose the same engineering, maybe even some of the same actual electronics.

 

More polyphony, better performance and an enhanced feel

I did not see any indication of any change to the feel.

 

This remains a live-focused keyboard

Nord has never done otherwise. :-)

[ElmerJFudd]

They did have some issues with the Ivory Feel (or whatever Fatar brands it) on the NP3. Perhaps they rectified this?

 

I should have quoted my post above.

 

"More polyphony, better performance and an enhanced feel"

 

- from https://www.musicradar.com/news/musikmesse-2018-the-nord-piano-4-looks-like-another-high-class-stage-keyboard

 

[AnotherScott]

Ah, I didn't realize you were quoting an article.

 

I believe they were mistaken to imply any change to the feel. It's a very loose interpretation of the press release. The Nord web site is pretty explicit about what's new, and there's nothing about feel in that respect.

 

[cphollis]

1GB of memory is a shame...

 

This

[cphollis]

1GB of memory is a shame...

 

This

 

Let me explain? My ancient NP2 more than meets my needs except for a paucity of piano memory. So I went with a NS3 Compact and MIDI-ing the 2GB of piano memory there. Lovely, lovely.

 

But now I only have *one* panel of the NS3 to work with when I play it directly, and that's a shame, really.

 

Would it be that the NP4 had 2GB as well, I'd be saving my pennies for it.

[stoken6]

I'm still tolerating the 500MB of my NS2. Using Small-size samples - in the heat of live performance, you can't tell the difference.

 

There's nothing in the NP4 that seems to me like a must-have over the NP3.

 

Cheers, Mike.

[cphollis]

I'm still tolerating the 500MB of my NS2. Using Small-size samples - in the heat of live performance, you can't tell the difference.

 

There's nothing in the NP4 that seems to me like a must-have over the NP3.

 

Cheers, Mike.

 

... until we went to IEMs, and -- then -- yes, you start to hear subtle differences, especially during quiet passages.

[konaboy]

is there a technical or other reason why Nord cannot put a 100GB SSD inside and be done with it? Then you could have all the largest pianos from the library installed at once and pre-installed from the factory.

 

I had a NP1 and got rid of it, hooking it up to the computer, swapping out samples, and having to compromise by choosing medium or small sized samples became a drag, quickly.

 

Perhaps a SSD might be slightly slower to load than flash, but who cares if it takes a second longer when changing pianos between songs. Cost of SSDs can hardly be a factor these days.

 

[AnotherScott]

is there a technical or other reason why Nord cannot put a 100GB SSD inside and be done with it?

Very possibly. Streaming from disk is complex. Computers can do it because they're running a big sophisticated operating system on processors that support virtual memory management. Kronos does it the same way, by running Linux, and the tradeoff is a 3 minute boot. Without full blown computer hardware along with development or adaptation of a big, complex OS, the software and hardware infrastructure to support streaming-from-storage may simply not be there. (Kurzweil appears to have possibly found another approach with their flashplay, I'm not sure how that works... but whatever it is, they've patented it, so no one else can do it exactly their way, either.)

[ElmerJFudd]

Id be more inclined to suspect the small flash ram is cheap and upgrading the storage by 512gb a product cycle keeps their sales churning (as well as a healthy second hand market for their instruments which also funds purchase of the new models).

[konaboy]

Thanks for the input. Interesting. I was thinking that samples are loaded from SSD into RAM. Not stream the samples from SSD as you play. Each large piano is 100Mb compressed, that's not gonna make much of a dent on RAM memory.

 

I take your point about needing a OS to read data from the SSD.

Having said that, I'm not convinced, we've had hard disks in synths and samplers with low-level operating systems for decades, have we not?

 

If SSD is too taxing, why not microSD? I have a 64GB in my camera. Many modern synths and grooveboxes read and write to microSD? Reliability perhaps? So make the card slot accessible so the user can replace it. Reading a100Mb piano will be quick.

 

 

is there a technical or other reason why Nord cannot put a 100GB SSD inside and be done with it?

Very possibly. Streaming from disk is complex. Computers can do it because they're running a big sophisticated operating system on processors that support virtual memory management. Kronos does it the same way, by running Linux, and the tradeoff is a 3 minute boot. Without full blown computer hardware along with development or adaptation of a big, complex OS, the software and hardware infrastructure to support streaming-from-storage may simply not be there. (Kurzweil appears to have possibly found another approach with their flashplay, I'm not sure how that works... but whatever it is, they've patented it, so no one else can do it exactly their way, either.)

[AnotherScott]

Id be more inclined to suspect the small flash ram is cheap and upgrading the storage by 512gb a product cycle keeps their sales churning

I'm pretty sure that the 1.5 GB NOR flash in the NP4 is more expensive than an SSD.

 

I also don't think smaller incremental improvements is designed to churn sales cycles, because I think the biggest "competition" for a new Nord is not their previous model, but rather, what's available from others. That is, I think the Nord Piano 4 is not so much targeting Nord Piano 3 owners (who are likely not particularly in the market for a new piano) as it is people who are in the market and would be looking at buying an RD2000 or a Grandstage, for example. Of course Nord owners do sometimes upgrade their boards, but my guess would be that they more often wait for more than one generation, since, as you pretty much point out, the incremental upgrades are often not so compelling. So for example, I don't think we'll see tons of Electro 5 owners trading up to an E6... but the E6 would be more tempting to someone who is still using an E4 or earlier, because enough improvements have accumulated.

 

Thanks for the input. Interesting. I was thinking that samples are loaded from SSD into RAM. Not stream the samples from SSD as you play.

Ah, yes, if you're just looking to fully load into RAM as needed (rather than have them all available to stream), that should indeed be more do-able. As you point out, romplers used to do that kind of thing all the time. (Heck, sometimes they loaded new sounds from floppy disks!) It would be a bit of a paradigm shift, though, to be swapping sounds in and out as was done in the "old" days. It's a whole different approach that I don't know if people would warm to today. I mean, what would happen if you called up a saved piano patch on your Nord Piano that happened to use a piano that was not resident? You'd have to deal with the time to load it, and some way of specifying which piano sound to dump to make room for it. You're presumably not going to want to do that at a gig. And if you're doing it at home, well, there's not really so much of an advantage over the current approach, which doesn't require an additional drive and a bunch of RAM in the machine along with buttons and interface to manage it.

[cphollis]

All flash storage is not created equal.

 

The NOR flash in something like the Nord is an exotic beast. Almost as fast as RAM, yet persists between power cycles.

 

The benefit is that you can switch samples immediately, no loading time. Perfect for live performances rather than wait a few seconds for the new samples to load.

[fjzingo]

The Nord sampling handling is a dream compared to for example yamaha, seamless and quick. For example I havent upgraded Yamaha montage to the latest system due to the completely idiotic system with usb disks. In additon Last time I lost quite a few sounds/sound settings despite having everything backed up. Having said that it would be interesting if one could reach the nord library directly from the keyboard to the cloud, not having to pass a computer.

 

I really like the idea of customising youre keys not having to overload it with selections of eg pianos which are of no interest to me. It saves time.

[Quai34]

I'm still tolerating the 500MB of my NS2. Using Small-size samples - in the heat of live performance, you can't tell the difference.

 

There's nothing in the NP4 that seems to me like a must-have over the NP3.

 

Cheers, Mike.

 

I did the other approach, chosing definitely an XL, the imperial and an L, the Fazziolli in my stage 2 and with all the E.Pianos and no Harpsichord, I'm happy....When I will have to buy a newer board for Piano only, with more A. Piano versions, it will be wi a better keybed....So, it doesn't seem to be the NP4 yet....

[DanL]

I did something similar on my Electro5, I dumped everything and loaded up 3 XL grands, 1 XL upright, CP70 which isn't too big, another Medium size upright, and 7 different EPs. I dumped the harpsichord, and if I need that sound, I have one loaded in the sample memory section.

[jeffincltnc]

Nord Piano 3 (and presumably 4) has a fantastic action and is a very efficient weight/build quality for a 40 pound, 88 key instrument, but not too long, deep or heavy.

[ElmerJFudd]

[video:youtube]

[David Emm]

The improvement of offering 30 voices for the synth section would appeal to me greatly if I needed Nord-style powers. While you would probably go for a Nord Lead or similar tool if you had big synth plans, this will keep voices from dropping out as in previous models. That's the welcome kind of thing that sometimes allows you to leave the second 'board at home.

[ElmerJFudd]

Increasing poly was probably necessary to add the seamless sound transitions and the crossfade between between splits. You need the extra voices to maintain the existing sound and allocate the new sound to voices that are available. So, yeah, even with their effective note stealing algo... having 100, 120 voices accessible makes smooth sounding transitions more likely.

 

The Royal grand and upright are very nice sounding in solo piano setting, particularly with the damper and string resonance in place. Still, if they go $3k or higher on this instrument, that TP-40 variant is going to have to be excellent when an MP7SE is $1799 and CP4 $2k.

[zephonic]

For all its flaws, I kind of miss my NP88.

 

I did an event a few weeks ago where backline was provided so I requested the NP88 and a Fantom X7 as I know those like the back of my hand. They gave me a Nord Stage and when I hit that Rhodes I felt a pang of regret. It's only a 5MB sample, but they did something right!

 

Sure the action isn't great for pianissimo playing, and the AP's can be finicky with amplification. But I loved that it was lightweight, and I could play that Rhodes all day, it's butter.

 

I dig the MP7SE, but wouldn't want to schlep it on a daily basis. The CP4, well, it's a legend around here, but somehow I never really got on with it.

 

[sMatt]

Now that it's out, any updates?

 

 

Questions:

 

what case would you get with it?

 

what stand?

 

 

Thanks in advance for any and all thoughts.

 

[jimkost2002]

More polyphony, better performance and an enhanced feel

I did not see any indication of any change to the feel.

 

As I said in another post, I have recently played a NP4 in a colleagues studio and noticed a refinement from NP2&3, namely the quicker key rebound in addition to the ability to initiate play from an aready half depressed key. Nord says this was first introduced in the 3, but I noticed a BIG difference in responsiveness from the 3. The NP3 also had reports of key clacking that was fixed in later NP3s....(not sure from exactly which serial number).

 

Im taking delivery of an NP4 tomorrow and will let you know my findings after Ive put it through its paces.... I have a project deadline tomorrow evening, so it may be a few days.....

[jimkost2002]

As promised, heres my review of Nord Piano 4:

 

Nord has really shut out all contenders here (with the exception, action-wise, of Yamaha CP4 and Kawai MP11SE) like the Yankees did to the Blu Jays last Friday at Yankee Stadium!

 

I know this may seem like hyperbole, but hear me out:

 

In terms of mating a real ap sound with a responsive action, the only true competitor is the Yamaha CP4. The action of the CP is a true joy to play and the CFX and other onboard APs are truly life like and effortlessly wedded to the magnificent action, but......

 

NORD has really done a FANTASTIC job of tweaking the action (I use keyboard touch 1), especially when you pair it with the new Royal Grand 3D XL (boy, thats almost as awkward a name as the newest iphones....).

As a matter of fact, it was so good, I didnt feel the need to fish around for other APs, which is what Ive done with ALL NORDS SINCE THE ORIGINAL Electros and Stage Classic!

The EPs and Clavs play wonderfully with the new action!

I havent enjoyed a DP/Stage keyboard like this since the first Yamaha Slabs!

The CP feels more like a REAL piano, but the NP4 has a real responsiveness and quick return that REALLY surprised me!

And, the NP4 transmits and recieves PB and mod signals, which was a really nice surprise!

 

Also, for MY purposes, this checks all the boxes as Itll be a great virtual instrument controller and has FANTASTIC on-board sounds and is build Road tough, like all Nords.

OK, back to finishing my project...... boy oh boy, Im REALLY looking forward to playing Keyscape instruments with this board!