Clavia Nord's lost their spine!

[kensuguro]

Seems Nord's lost it's soul, seemingly found its position as the "ultimate bread and butter keyboard". That's what they make now.. just "keyboards". They killed Nord Mod G2, dunno what's up with Nord Wave (I think it's a waste of time), you see Nord Lead's shadow lurking around somewhere. The main Electro, Stage, and "Piano" I guess makes them the big bucks? Why do I smell a business optimization taking place.. as if they don't have the capital to stay edgy.

It's hard to see Nord boasting "500mb of sample ram" in this day and age. The proposition is crazy because you need a laptop and usb to upload samples to your Electro/Stage/Piano... but wait... if you had that, won't you just use any of the ginormous libs out there? Unless the thought of using your laptop as a sound source freaks you out, there is absolutely no reason anyone would choose a 500mb (for ALL instruments) rompler over a streaming rompler (Kontakt). Yet they're increasing the hardware's rompler-ness! Well, I try to tell myself the value is having everything in one place, on hardware. Ok, there's something inherently soothing about that. No audio interfaces, no Windows to deal with, no latency settings, etc.. still hard to justify if you ask me.

The Stage retains the synth guts of Nord Lead, but it seems they've decided to stop catering to the synth fans, and instead just become a Yamaha/Roland/Kawaii competitor. I wonder if their synth sales were threatened by some other VA manufacturer? It does seem like Virus caught on with trance/electro people, whereas Nord Lead has always been a "true keyboardist's synth".. definite difference in market size right there. Also Roland/Korg/Yamaha/Dave Smith and so on are throwing in their players.. actually crowding the VA space considering it's sort of a niche market to begin with.

So is bread and butter keyboard the only way to survival? It breaks me up to see one of the last hardware manufacturers turn into a spineless space filler with a big brand to cling on.. I doubt the industry needs yet another one of those.

[garyb]

you are so right.
another reason why i am so worked up over a little company making audio tools because they love the system...

[erminardi]

never loved Clavia sound, also Nord Modular...

[pwhitmaker]

Nice though that a little country as Sweden has two world-famous synth manufactures.
Clavia and Propellerheads!

[sharc]

...and Elektron

[jksuperstar]

I've have/had both the clavia nord mods, and never understood why they didn't make a Nord Lead or even a Wave, that looks to most synth artists and key players like your standard preset-based synth. But add a back-door for the modular folks, who can really muck around inside the architecture. Best of both worlds, and a long life product because the modular freaks would always give everyone else something to toy with. Who knows, maybe some keyboard players would then learn a bit more abut their synth architecture, and get into modular stuff, too.

Anyway, it's why I jumped over to the SCOPE system. I still can't let go of my Clavia just yet, as there's too many patches that are very large and probably not portable to the SCOPE system, yet. But I'm going to sample the hell out of it for the beats I do have, and just let go at some point.

I don know a fair number of people who still prefer hardware over anything else. I don't think it's a digital/analog war either, just a trust issue with computers. Anybody caught with their pants down on stage would probably be sensitive for a while.