NAMM: Clavia Nord Piano

"The Nord Piano is designed with the performing musician in mind and is very lightweight at approx. 18 kg (39.6 lbs).

The Nord Piano comes equipped with several acoustic and electric pianos and harpsichords. Other pianos are available as free downloads from the Nordkeyboards.com website.

The sounds are stored in a Flash memory with a 512 MB capacity. This allows you to replace every piano if you wish and the sounds are kept intact in the memory even when the unit is turned off, no loading time is necessary. The sounds are available for free and easily exchanged by using the Nord Sound Manager application, which runs on Mac OSX, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 computers. The Nord Sound Manager allows you to quickly organize your programs according to your needs and allows you to create backups of the entire content in your Nord Piano.

String Resonance
One of the Nord missions is to deliver more, in every aspect. Using the Nord Resonance Ready pianos (e.g. the R-labeled Grand’s and Upright’s), you can activate the Resonance feature on the panel, which will add this acoustic phenomenon to the Nord sound. The Nord crew has gone to great lengths to ensure an accurate reproduction of the acoustic resonance, using the actual sound of the source instrument in an extremely realistic way.

Nord Piano Pedal with extended functionality
The Nord Piano can use the new Nord Piano pedal, providing the functionality of all the three pedals found on an acoustic grand piano. The Nord Piano pedal functionality have been closely modeled to allow you to “play the pedal” in the same fashion as on an acoustic grand.

The soft pedal (also known as the una corda) makes the sound significantly softer. The sostenuto pedal in the middle provides the latching sustain functionality that sustains only held notes, when activated. When you activate the sustain pedal, you can hear pedal noise and the dampers being lifted from the strings. The force with which you operate the pedal will influence the levels of the components and you can even add percussive sounds from the mechanism by just striking the pedal itself. With the Nord Piano pedal (or a continuous sustain pedal from another manufacturer) you can also use half-pedaling and other techniques like “catching” released keys with the pedal, a unique feature on the Nord Piano.

Effects, EQ and Amps
Dial in your preferred sound with the effects and the powerful three-band equalizer with sweep-able mid, and save the settings with a quick double tap on the Store button. The effects in the Nord Piano are just as detailed as the piano sounds them selves. The tremolo adds that perfect vibe, the pan sweeps across the stereo panorama, and the auto-wah brings out the funk in you, like never before.

Whenever you want to spice up a sound with a beautiful phaser, a screaming flanger, a lush chorus, these are readily available. These modulation effects are modeled from a couple of highly desirable vintage effects.

The Nord Piano Speaker models faithfully reproduces the overdrive response of different amplifier/cabinet combinations, lending your sound that authentic feel. Select the desired speaker model – Small, JC or Twin – and use the Drive knob to add powerful tube amplifier distortion to your piano sound. Even the slightest amount will make a big difference to the sonic character."