Archipelago Suite - Spring (for vibraphone and piano)

Hi! A lot of water has been flowing in river Aura since my last post. As this video might show, my music has taken quite different path. Few years ago I re-found an instrument of my youth: vibraphone. It's also my first recording with brand new Nord Grand.

Few tech specs:
Vibraphone is Malletech Omega, piano is Nord Grand from swedish Clavia with "White Grand" sound. Song is Recorded with Neumann KM184 mic and two Motu Ultralite mk3 audio interfaces.

New stuff!

Hi,

And greetings from our belowed home country Finland which celebrates its 100 years of independence! Here's a new video from my brother (http://www.sydolphindance.com) which he edited from years of shooting material, mainly from his sailing trips. I was lucky to get my music to it, "Archipelago part 2- Isokari".

And here's a small snippet from my new version of an old song of mine "Solar Wind". December 2017 I added there a track of e-piano to make it little more "human". Otherwise this song is rather minimalistic, pure electronic music.

Both songs can be listened completely via SoundCloud:

A Quick review of Nord Stage 3

Hi all!

I am very lucky to have received my brand new Nord Stage 3 HP76 while so many people are still waiting for their instruments. Now it's been few weeks with my new baby and here's what I feel about it:

Quick pros and Cons:
+ 76-model is suprisingly good keyboard for its very light weight, it's just 12,5 kg (27.5 lb)! It has enough key weight and precision for a piano player and it's also mechanically very quiet. 
+ Those extra GigaBytes of piano and sample memory really make things different. Nord Piano and Sample libraries are great collection allready and continuously developing. Now you can have so many of your favorite pianos (sampled with XL-size) inside your Stage. 
+ Two bright OLED-displays make things much more usable (compared to older Nords).
+ new synth has lot of power and high quality sound
+ nice little extras here and there (new filter effects and new morphing capabilities for example)

- Firmware bugs. Users have found quite a lot of problems and anomalies (some of them are minor, some more critical). Just read this sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0
- Sample Library incompatibility and lack of (fully functional) Sound Manager or Sample Editor. New Stage 3 is using a new format for samples and (on 30th August) we're still waiting for editor and conversion software. At the moment NS3 cannot use neither sample library sound nor user's own samples. This frustrates me most.
- Synth. NS3 synth was advertised as having Lead A1 engine. As a A1 owner this seems little overstatement. NS3 feels little limited compared to A1. (On the other hand there are some features you cannot get from A1: Sample playback obviously but also Superwaves).

New video from Lapland with my music

Please check a new video from our winter holiday in Lapland. Video was filmed and edited by my brother Antti, music is a song of mine called "Day One at Celestial Backyard". (You can listen to this song in its original form in My Music)

New in Nord Piano Library: Roal Grand 3D

Like many times before, Clavia has again given us a nice little Christmas present: a new grand piano sample set called Royal Grand 3D. So far Clavia hasn't revealed the exact piano model which was sampled, but I suspect it is a Yamaha. At least it sounds more modern compared to those more vintage ones. "3D" comes from the fact that it's binaurally recorded simulating players position. As they put it: "The dummy head is shaped like an average sized human head, equipped with ear shaped microphones, in order to reproduce the human hearing experience. The Royal Grand 3D was recorded in an acoustically dampened room where the dummy head was placed in the player's position to capture a natural and authentic experience of actually sitting in front of the piano."

Royal Grand feels just great - it's maybe Clavia Piano Library's best in terms of playability. At least on Nord Piano 3's action you'll get just right response, right tone from pp to ff. With earlier Bright Grand (Yamaha) for example, I felt that those brighter tones (forte) came out sometimes too easily. Royal Grand feels so easy and natural to control. It's more close to my idea of playing a real grand piano.

On the other hand, it can perhaps be too "round" sounding to cut thru in difficult acoustics or noisy gig situation. Quite often if you start to mess with EQ you'll loose something (natural sound and/or playability). Time will tell. To my ears Royal Grand is little closer to Roland's typical piano sounds. They are very even but they can be little "muddy" on stage situation. Clavia's Bright Grand is so clear and powerful and I never need to EQ it or anything. Those mellower pianos sound great at home or on recording but on stage they can be problematic.

More on Royal Grand 3D from Clavia's site:
(link)

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).

Archipelago Part 1 - Overture

Please check Overture (part 1), intro of my Archipelago Suite.

This is a set of tunes made for a film series about Finnish & Swedish Archipelago.