Nord Piano 3 review

I remember being very excited when I heard about new Nord Piano 3 (NP3) which was announced at NAMM 2016. I had owned the very first version of Nord Piano, but last couple of years my only Nord has been Stage 2 (76 keys) which is a work horse I still use on most of my gigs. In almost all my latest recordings I have used some of Clavia's piano sound - they have a great piano library which covers the most famous grand pianos from Steinway to Bosendorfer, many different soulfull uprights and great electric pianos. (link here)

Nord Piano 3

So basically with NP3 there was nothing new with sound. My personal reasons to buy it was to get 88 keys, doubled memory capacity (1 GB for pianos and 256 MB for samples) and the best piano action Clavia has been able to give us so far. Other very nice improvement was the new very bright OLED-display. 

I believe for many of us the most interesting question is how good this new piano action actually is? To my fingers it's very good and clearly an improvement over earlier models, but not quite as realistic as my Kawai CS-7's action which is little more close to a real grand piano. On the other hand CS7 weights 80 kg and it's clearly not for gigging. If you want to make more fair comparison with NP3 and Kawai, you should probably take Kawai MP11 (stage piano) for this comparison. More components of real grand piano action makes it bigger and heavier: MP11 weights 32.5 kg and NP3 just 18.2 kg.

NP3 in its place in my cellar

NP3 has triple sensor action which makes it possible to trigger hammers more precisely and more faster. For example, you don't need to release a key all the way up before pressing it down again and still you'll get a sound. This is a welcomed feature if you play lot of fast repetitions. In general I feel that with new NP3 I have more control over different dynamics from pp to ff. Difference is not huge but still I feel that my Kawai CS-7 is more sensitive and perhaps little more heavier. I believe that the some difference in playing feeling come from two things: Kawai has escapement feature ("point of sound" in middle of key press) and more steinwaylike texture on their keys. For some reason Nord decided to not use "Ivory Keybed" which was announced at NAMM 2016. To most demanding piano enthusiasts NP3's keys can feel little plastic. But anyway these things aren't deal breaker to me and my fingers; with my new NP3 I can have best possible digital piano on my gigs and best piano sound on my recordings. One last very good thing to mention is that NP3 action is very quiet. Older Nords were very noisy and therefore annoying to use at home with lower volumes. Time will tell how quiet NP3 remains when it has hundreds of kilometres of road behind.

If I need to say some critical about Nord Piano 3 it's about something that's been there since Nord Piano 1 and 2. First, there's no external MIDI panel which makes Nord Stage 2 very powerful with external MIDI devices. Of course, Nord Piano has MIDI in/out (both traditional and USB) so it's basically possible to play some other gear with it but to be honest it really should have some buttons (at least external MIDI on/off button) and few knobs for controlling external gear. In general I like Nord Piano's simplicity - it's A PIANO and certainly not a workstation! - but because of this simplicity it should have better options to connect it to other gear. My second criticism goes to its sample playback synth which is of course simple and many ways very usable. But in my opinion there's one thing that should be there: a filter (cutoff and resonance and preferably those most basic filter choices). I am a synth enthusiast and to my mind synth without a filter is quite handicapped one. Of course I am not imagining to play killer leads with Nord Piano but any synth pad is quite lifeless without a filter.

More about Nord Piano from Clavia's web site (link).