Hallowe'en in Barrow. Testing out the Nord Wave

 

Some gigs make you feel old. Props to the Monster Monster crew for throwing this party.

 
 
Very eerie after-party. We found ourselves huddling for warmth in this spooky disused restaurant. With outside temperatures plummeting, we had a bit of a spinal tap moment as nobody had a clue where the van was parked except Kimba who had retired to the safety of the van hours earlier. So the rest of us roamed the streets at 4am getting totally lost.. it truely could have been the fateful demise of the band had guest soundman James not managed to answer his phone..

 
 

 

 

Look I've bought a new toy and I'm resenting it heavily. With the laptop crashing one time too many I've bitten the bullet and spent stupid amounts of money to sacrifice a lot of flexibility for a little bit more reliability. Okay, admittedly, there's something a bit sexy about the Nord Wave but considering what you can achieve with software on a laptop I feel like I've had a lot of money taken from me for a piece of gear that doesn't have huge amounts of technology in it. It just happens to be the only hardware synth on the market right now that does what I need it to do. Gah.

Mini-review:
It's a good, solid build. Well the knobs feel nice to turn, the stone mod wheel is cool but doesn't give enough grip for rapid wobbing. I worry about the weight of the wheel causing eventual damage to itself.. the mod wheel does need to be pretty durable to survive a Subsource tour, we'll see. Pitch-bend range is restricted to having one global setting rather than per-instrument which is annoying, but it is hands-down the best action on a controller I have experienced. There's absolutely no dead-zone and responds to the slightest of force without any unwanted motion.

The sole strength of the Nord Wave lies in being able to import samples as waveforms - this is a job it does well (with a slightly cumbersome software interface).. at this price you'd expect a better graphical display on the keyboard to let you know what you're doing. Given the amount of scope this synth offers I'm a bit confused as to the presets it ships with. There are some nice, warm sounds on there but the ones you'd be most likely to use suck pretty bad. (i.e. Piano/Rhodes). Plenty of strings/choir/pad sounds. Not sure how useful the synthesized trumpet/brass/accordion sounds are going to be useful to anyone. I'd love to meet the man who buys this for the accordion preset. Seriously, what are you thinking Clavia?

The Nord site states, "Great samples are not determined by their size in bytes, but by how well their detail and character are preserved". When it comes to imitating real-life instruments though, synthesized modelled instruments just don't cut it for me and in terms of sound I'd go for big, high-quality samples any day.

When it comes to the electronic sounds, there's plenty of scope to play with a two oscillators, two LFOs and a nice polite filter (very useable and playable but won't let you get properly angry filter sweeps like Novation would - then again, I can see it as a safety mechanism for avoidance of rupturing big soundsystems and violating health and safety guidelines at gigs). Again at this price I'm disappointed at not having a second filter and multiple types of overdrive over the single 'tube overdrive' offered.

I couldn't possibly recommend this to anybody who wants to jump in and make a great sound straight away - to get anything decent out of this you're going to need to spend some time creating and tweaking your own sounds. For this much money, you really shouldn't have to. Personally I'm looking forward to seeing what the Waldorf Blofeld keyboard has to offer which is out very soon, is much cheaper and seems better specced.

The customisability of the Nord Wave is a great thing but Clavia don't seem to be taking advantage as much as they could... they should have boosted the sample memory available (the 256MB it comes with must be dirt cheap to manufacture these days), increased the number of banks available and had an area on their site encouraging users to form and share vast arrays of sounds. Then get Rob Papen/BT/Brian Eno or anyone of their ilk to do a few celebrity soundbanks and hey presto.. it'd be a true winner.