The Nord Electro 4D - 61-Note Semi-Weighted Keyboard with USB offers a wide range of classic keyboard sounds and performance-friendly features. Like its predecessors, it's focused on electromechanical keyboards like organs, electric pianos, and clavinets, but also offers the ability load additional sounds from Nord's Piano and Sample libraries. You can even add your own samples.
To make the experience of playing the Electro 4D's organ sounds even more realistic, Nord equipped it with some great features from its C2D organ, including a set of physical drawbars and the B3 tone-wheel organ engine. Add in the new simulation of a vintage 122 rotary-speaker cabinet, and it's clear that the Electro 4D's organ patches offer a super-realistic sound and feel. Authentic-sounding Vox and Farfisa simulations are included, as well.
The piano section contains 185 MB of sounds from the Nord Piano Library, including grand, upright, and electric pianos, along with harphsichords and clavinets. Besides the preloaded sounds, the entire library is included in the box on a DVD, so you can load in more of your favorite sounds.
You can also download and access the Nord Sample Library, which contains Mellotron and Chamberlin samples, plus third-party sounds from Sonic Reality, Precision Sound, Kirk Hunter Studios, and more. To help you manage your sounds, you can download the free Nord Sound Manager (Mac/Win), a software librarian for Nord keyboards that allows you to drag and drop sounds into your Electro 4D, and organize and backup the sounds in the keyboard.
Nord has also augmented the effects section with the addition of a stereo delay featuring a Tap Tempo button and a Ping-Pong mode. The delay augments pan, tremolo, auto-wah, phaser, flanger, chorus, amp-simulation, compressor and reverb effects, which were brought over from the Electro 3. The Electro 4D is outfitted with a USB port, so it can be used as a MIDI controller. It has 61 semi-weighted Waterfall keys. In keeping with Nord's design philosophy of providing simple and intuitive user interfaces on its keyboards, the Electro 4D has dedicated knobs and buttons that control most of its functions. To further simplify its operation for live performance, the functions that are only accessible via menu are printed out on the panel so that you can find them quickly.
Performers will also appreciate that there are now 4 Live memory locations available (as opposed to 1 on the Nord Electro 3), as well as 4 banks of 32 patches. Weighing only 15.3 lbs (7.65 kg ), the Electro 4 is incredibly lightweight and easy to carry around.