| Nord Stage 2: Stereo Image/Phase Issues
Our Keyboarder has recently upgraded his rig with a Nord Stage 2 HA88.
I´m a big fan of Nord, and know the Organ section from studio recordings I´ve made with an Organ Trio.
And when demoing in our local shop, it clearly won over the Korg Kronos which had thinner less solid sounds compared to the Nord.
On Stage though, we had 4 gigs of pure horror, where we didn´t manage to get the Nord sound right through his monitor.
While his upper keyboard sounded good, the Nord always sounded thin and boxy.
We checked it out in the studio:
The Pianos and Organs have horrible mono compatibility.
As long as you listen to them on a stereo system, they sound fantastic.
If I hit the mono button, there´s so much phase canceling going on that you get a thin and boxy sound.
We tried the standard solution: Just route the left OR right channel to the monitor.
But this sounds crappy as well (with all effects off except for reverb on piano and leslie-emu on organ).
On the next gig, we provided our keyboard player with stereo monitoring - and he was smiling the complete gig and having nothing but fun with the nord. As soon as we switched back to mono, he immediately recognised it, even if we routed only the left or right signal to both monitors.
I´ve been recording acoustic pianos dozens of times.
I know that a mono summed mix of a stereo miked piano doesn´t sound great.
But listening to ONLY the left or right mic should always give a proper signal that´s mono, and reflects the position in the piano - but never sounds boxy or thin.
What´s your experience with Nord´s piano/string samples?
Do you feel they might have applied some sort of stereo spread magic onto their piano samples? That would explain the incomplete sound when listening to only on side of the output signal...
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