Nord Electro

The Nord Electro is a series of electronic keyboards, developed in Sweden by Clavia, that digitally emulate electro-mechanical keyboards, such as electric pianos and electronic organs, while designed to be highly portable.

Features

The Nord Electro has two sections. One is a sample-player intended for electric pianos, although samples of acoustic grand and upright pianos are also available. The sample libraries are exchangeable, and Clavia has made several samples libraries available for free for Nord Electro owners. The second section is a digital emulation of electronic organs. This is not sample based, but instead generated by the digital modelling of several types of organs. Unlike many other keyboards that feature tonewheel organ emulation, the drawbars of the Nord Electro are represented by LED bar graphs and up/down buttons instead of the traditional mechanical drawbars.

There is an effect section that emulates popular "stomp box" effect pedals from the '70s and the famous Leslie rotary speaker cabinet. These can be applied to either piano or organ. Additionally, the pianos contain a presence control, and the Clavinet includes settings to emulate the various switches found on the original instrument. As with other Clavia products, it is distinctive for its red color. Unlike the Clavia Nord Stage, it can only play one instrument at a time, although a second keyboard can be attached via MIDI as an additional organ manual.

Nord

Nord is Catalan, Danish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian and Swedish for north. The term may refer to:

People

Places

Electro

Electro or Elektro may refer to:

Music

Fiction

Other

Nord Piano

The Nord Piano is a digital piano developed in Sweden, by Clavia. Although the Nord Pianos are a sample players that can play any of the sounds in the Nord Sample Library, it is primarily intended as a replacement for the electronic or acoustic piano.

Models

The Nord Piano, released in 2010, has 88 keys with hammer action, an effects section with effects such as reverb and amplifier simulations. It also has some unusual features designed to make the piano sounds more realistic, such a simulation of unplayed strings resonating in sympathy with the played strings, and samples of the pedals noises. Up to 120 programs can be used in 24 banks, with a total of 500MB RAM available for samples.

In 2012 Clavia released the Nord Piano 2. The main differences are that the Nord Piano 2 adds a second section of samples dedicated to playing non-piano samples either layered with the piano sounds or by splitting the keyboard.

Reception

When reviewing the original Nord Piano, Sound on Sound reported that "In the interests of balance, I tried to find something about the NP88 I didn’t like, but had little luck". While the effectiveness of the instrument in Mono Output mode was questioned, the conclusion was "I won’t beat around the bush: I think the Nord Piano is fantastic."