This video, via NordKeyboards, is a virtual tour of the factory in Stockholm where Nord keyboards are made.
14 thoughts on “Nord Factory Tour”
I couldn’t help notice they didn’t show a room where they were furiously developing a new Nord Modular.
Bastards.
I was thinking the same!
The guys gave to make a buck and there are worse ways to do it than making great sounding, beautiful keyboards.
Yeah…I meant to say, that: “I was thinking the same without the bastard part”.
I love Nord instruments, and I’d love to get Electro or even Stage at some point, even if they don’t make Modular, but I think a new Nord Modular in every ten years would be commercially safer, than waste the know how, that they have on a subject. Stages and Electros are very competitive instruments now, but how about future.
Previous Nord Modulars weren’t necessarily fantastic sales hits, but the times have changed a bit as synth players have matured out of the rompler hegemony that ailed at the time of first Nord Modulars.
I actually meant the “Bastards” lovingly. To this day I regret not buying a Nord Lead when they first came out — just couldn’t swing it. Their modular/micromodular synths were ahead of their time. I have a hard time imagining what they could come up with now if they threw a few hundred dollars of DSP into a Modular 3 and released it at a $999 street price. We’ve had nearly 15 years of processing power improvement since the G2…
No chinese people?
That’s Behringer!
Are there any Chinese synths?
Ach yeah,it’s beller than ALTULIA factoly
nice to see they assemble their instruments in sweden! 🙂
are the individual parts also made in sweden, or in a low cost country? (genuine question, sarcasm not intended.)
A great and honest video. There’s how its done, lads. It reminds me of how Moog is set up. I once played a Nord Lead 3 and was amazed at how tight and responsive it felt. I haven’t had the money and the need arrive at the same time, but I’d buy a Wave in a heartbeat as a serious player’s instrument. It has a good bundled sample editor, but the way its structured is clearly aimed at the user who wants to customize setups that favor live playing. Its a sensible hybrid, IMO.
As far as a new Modular goes, wellll, I’d say the smart way to go now would be to offer it as a softsynth. We are deluged with modulars of all stripes now, so I would not dis Nord for sticking with their great pianos and synths. I don’t think a serious patchcord-spaghetti hardware Nord would fly now. However, updating their previous modular, which was programmed with a MAX-style soft-editor anyway, yeah, that seems appealing now that modulars have become big again. Would you pay, say, $325 for a software Nord Modular that would cost you $4000 as hardware? Would you pay an additional $25 if Nord committed to at least 5 years of updating, porting and a few debuggings? That seems like the center point of the X-Y between common sense, GAS, actual commitment and financial reality. Does that sound like a working compromise to you modular fans, even if it does depend on the host computer?
I’d rather take the $4k hardware, even if I need a computer to patch it. I’d also rather take an iPad to make the patches.
When I bought the Nord Modular (G1) initially I didn’t think it would be a problem to be dependent on a computer for patch editing. But then Mac OS X came and Clavia did neither finish porting the editor to Mac OS X (later there would have been the problem with the move from PPC to Intel, but I digress) nor did they open up the specs so that a third party could come up with an editor (the only “specs” of the protocol and data format used to talk to the NM I know of that are out there were obtained by reverse engineering). That’s on the one hand understandable (given the finiteness of resources and the fact that Windows 7 still runs the original editor quite fine apart from the fact that it’s pain to have to operate a Windows PC just to edit an instrument) and on the other not so much. A new Nord Modular should in theory be editable from the from panel even if the UI in that case degrades exponentially. It should be possible to come up with a simple patch in a few minutes using just that interface. For the communication they should really have a published spec like we have with MIDI.
For audio perhaps expansion cards like some audio interfaces/converters or samplers etc. have. Keeps the baseline cost down and gives most anybody the audio conncectivity he needs. I get carried away like many when it comes to the Nord Modular, one of the greatest instruments of our time.
Given cheap processing power, I think they could make a software/hardware combo for well under $4K. I don’t think anyone expect them to do a huge Moog-style patchable modular (it would be awesome if they did). Instead, they need to update their software and cram a half dozen DSP chips and a small SSD into a box with USB 3.0, stereo in, 4 outs and MIDI (Thunderbolt if they’re feeling saucy). List $1299, street a grand.
Given the factory, where you pay for your workers, I wouldn’t expect such a powerful synth to cost unnder $1,999. Especially considering, you would have to make the money put into R&D back.
Add sample support in G3 and it will make most of my synths obsolete. They could then use the engine in the Next Stage too.
I couldn’t help notice they didn’t show a room where they were furiously developing a new Nord Modular.
Bastards.
I was thinking the same!
The guys gave to make a buck and there are worse ways to do it than making great sounding, beautiful keyboards.
Yeah…I meant to say, that: “I was thinking the same without the bastard part”.
I love Nord instruments, and I’d love to get Electro or even Stage at some point, even if they don’t make Modular, but I think a new Nord Modular in every ten years would be commercially safer, than waste the know how, that they have on a subject. Stages and Electros are very competitive instruments now, but how about future.
Previous Nord Modulars weren’t necessarily fantastic sales hits, but the times have changed a bit as synth players have matured out of the rompler hegemony that ailed at the time of first Nord Modulars.
I actually meant the “Bastards” lovingly. To this day I regret not buying a Nord Lead when they first came out — just couldn’t swing it. Their modular/micromodular synths were ahead of their time. I have a hard time imagining what they could come up with now if they threw a few hundred dollars of DSP into a Modular 3 and released it at a $999 street price. We’ve had nearly 15 years of processing power improvement since the G2…
No chinese people?
That’s Behringer!
Are there any Chinese synths?
Ach yeah,it’s beller than ALTULIA factoly
nice to see they assemble their instruments in sweden! 🙂
are the individual parts also made in sweden, or in a low cost country? (genuine question, sarcasm not intended.)
A great and honest video. There’s how its done, lads. It reminds me of how Moog is set up. I once played a Nord Lead 3 and was amazed at how tight and responsive it felt. I haven’t had the money and the need arrive at the same time, but I’d buy a Wave in a heartbeat as a serious player’s instrument. It has a good bundled sample editor, but the way its structured is clearly aimed at the user who wants to customize setups that favor live playing. Its a sensible hybrid, IMO.
As far as a new Modular goes, wellll, I’d say the smart way to go now would be to offer it as a softsynth. We are deluged with modulars of all stripes now, so I would not dis Nord for sticking with their great pianos and synths. I don’t think a serious patchcord-spaghetti hardware Nord would fly now. However, updating their previous modular, which was programmed with a MAX-style soft-editor anyway, yeah, that seems appealing now that modulars have become big again. Would you pay, say, $325 for a software Nord Modular that would cost you $4000 as hardware? Would you pay an additional $25 if Nord committed to at least 5 years of updating, porting and a few debuggings? That seems like the center point of the X-Y between common sense, GAS, actual commitment and financial reality. Does that sound like a working compromise to you modular fans, even if it does depend on the host computer?
I’d rather take the $4k hardware, even if I need a computer to patch it. I’d also rather take an iPad to make the patches.
When I bought the Nord Modular (G1) initially I didn’t think it would be a problem to be dependent on a computer for patch editing. But then Mac OS X came and Clavia did neither finish porting the editor to Mac OS X (later there would have been the problem with the move from PPC to Intel, but I digress) nor did they open up the specs so that a third party could come up with an editor (the only “specs” of the protocol and data format used to talk to the NM I know of that are out there were obtained by reverse engineering). That’s on the one hand understandable (given the finiteness of resources and the fact that Windows 7 still runs the original editor quite fine apart from the fact that it’s pain to have to operate a Windows PC just to edit an instrument) and on the other not so much. A new Nord Modular should in theory be editable from the from panel even if the UI in that case degrades exponentially. It should be possible to come up with a simple patch in a few minutes using just that interface. For the communication they should really have a published spec like we have with MIDI.
For audio perhaps expansion cards like some audio interfaces/converters or samplers etc. have. Keeps the baseline cost down and gives most anybody the audio conncectivity he needs. I get carried away like many when it comes to the Nord Modular, one of the greatest instruments of our time.
Given cheap processing power, I think they could make a software/hardware combo for well under $4K. I don’t think anyone expect them to do a huge Moog-style patchable modular (it would be awesome if they did). Instead, they need to update their software and cram a half dozen DSP chips and a small SSD into a box with USB 3.0, stereo in, 4 outs and MIDI (Thunderbolt if they’re feeling saucy). List $1299, street a grand.
Given the factory, where you pay for your workers, I wouldn’t expect such a powerful synth to cost unnder $1,999. Especially considering, you would have to make the money put into R&D back.
Add sample support in G3 and it will make most of my synths obsolete. They could then use the engine in the Next Stage too.