Nord Piano News: Nord has launched the brand new Nord Piano 2 at NAMM 2012 HA 88, and true to the company’s illustrious form, it’s another leap in professional, hammer-action decadence. With extensive additional feature sets that bring the hardware bang up to date with competitive rival plug-ins and a player’s piano feel and new controls making it all the more authentic, it covers all your bases.
Perhaps the most important addition is one of sympathetic strings, or Acoustic Resonance as it’s called here, which replicates the sounds of strings other than the ones you’re playing very gently reverberating in the background – it’s the piano ‘jangle’ that occurs when you hit an acoustic instrument’s keys hard with the sustain on, and its inclusion here can only make for a more authentic playing experience.
New features include a triple pedal that’s been engineered not only to feel like a real piano’s would, but is also capable of generating the incidental dampener sounds too – Nord describes them as ‘stomp’ and ‘sizzle’.
Nord is also making a big deal of the fact that you can replace every single sound stored within the Piano 2 HA 88, to the extent of editing full sample instruments using the included software. Selecting, editing, layering and splitting sounds with dedicated buttons should be a simplistic, common-sense experience – Nord is keen to avoid endless menu cycling, and therefore has made sure that all major functions are represented by hands-on controls. The layers, incidentally, can be slowly brought into your mix by attaching a volume pedal to the provided input.
Finally, the FX section on the Nord Piano 2 HA 88 is particularly comprehensive – you’re able to fire up amp simulations, add choruses, delays and wah-wahs, and EQ your tones to get them just-so.
It’s the quality and playing authenticity that Nord is known for, with significantly more in the way of features, and the Acoustic Resonance and redesigned pedal sounds alone are worth your attention.
