Digital Combo, Tonewheel & Pipe Organ
The Nord C2D expands on the success of its
predecessor with an improved Hammond emulation and the addition, for the
first time, of real drawbars.
Clavia have been
recreating the sounds of organs for many years. The company started with
their Hammond emulation in the ‘piano plus organ’ Electro series, and
later added Vox and Farfisa models alongside a basic polysynth in the
Stage series. Inevitably, the different requirements of the piano, organ
and synth sections led to design compromises, so I was delighted when
they separated the organs from the rest and gave them an impressive new,
dual-manual home in the original Nord C1. Next, the company added
a sampled baroque organ, which marked the most significant upgrade from
the C1 to the C2. But, while the sounds and treatments improved at each
step, the philosophy of the control panel remained the same, wherein the
player was constrained to imitating the pulling and pushing of
drawbars, or the switching on and off of tabs (or even, on the C2, the
pulling out and pushing in of organ stops) by pressing so-called
‘drawbuttons’ that moved virtual controls and displayed their resulting
positions using rows of illuminated LEDs. This meant that anyone whose
performances relied on ‘playing’ drawbars or instantly flipping multiple
switches had to look elsewhere, and, given the number of the so-called
clonewheel organs with physical drawbars, this must have cost Clavia
sales.
Today, however, there’s the Nord C2D,
resplendent in its new burgundy livery and sporting a full set of 38
(sort of) drawbars. Of course, there’s much that remains the same on the
C2 and the C2D, so, rather than cover these pages with regurgitated
facts and opinions, please allow me to direct you to my reviews of the
C1 (SOS April 2008) and C2 (SOS February 2010), which will tell you much
of what you want to know. In this review, we’ll concentrate primarily
on the features that differentiate them.
The Hammond Model
The
most significant change is, of course, the addition of the drawbars.
You might think that there’s nothing to say about this other than, ‘hey,
it’s now got a full set of drawbars!’ But you would be wrong...
To
understand this, you have to be aware that on a C1 or C2, selecting
a program not only recalls the sound, it sets the ‘virtual’ drawbars (or
switches or stops) to the positions defined within that sound, and
illuminates its LED read-outs accordingly. The C2D doesn’t have
motorised drawbars and has no such LEDs. For any given sound, it shows
you if a drawbar is active or not (which is fine for the on/off switches
and stops of the Farfisa and pipe organs), but not the amount by which
a drawbar is extended in the Hammond and Vox emulations. Furthermore,
unlike some other Hammond emulators, there’s no page on the new, 16 x
2-character LCD to display the registration. You can edit within its
menus much more quickly and, for the first time, name Nord C-series
patches sensibly, but you can’t see what sound is going to emerge when
you press the next note. What’s more, pressing the drawbuttons on the C2
immediately edited the selected sound. The C2D doesn’t allow this; you
have to hold down the appropriate Preset button and then move the
drawbars to edit an existing sound. This requires both hands, so many
players will find it to be a significant shortcoming, because it means
that you can’t ‘play’ the drawbars if your starting point is any memory
other than the continuously updated, non-volatile ‘Live’ setting. This
is actually no different from a genuine Hammond, on which it’s only when
you press the reversed A# or B keys (which select the left-hand and
right-hand sets of drawbars on each manual, respectively) that the
drawbars can be used to create new sounds. Nonetheless, I think that
Clavia should consider addressing this, because it’s a backward step.
The
topic of selecting presets on the C2D now arises. In addition to the A#
and B keys mentioned above, a console-style Hammond has 10 further
reversed keys to the left of the manuals that allow the player to chose
from nine preset sounds, plus silence, for each. Consequently, I’m
delighted to see that the C2D now has its preset selectors positioned on
two small panels to the left of the manuals, and that the buttons that
select the drawbars have been duplicated here. In many ways, this is
equivalent to having the G, G#, A, A# and B selector keys of a genuine
Hammond reinstated. Unfortunately, two of them are the wrong way round:
the Nord’s ‘A’ buttons are where the ‘B’ buttons should be, and
vice-versa, which means that you will forever be hitting the wrong one
and wondering where your percussion has gone! Please, Clavia, swap these
over immediately. And, while you’re at it, you could change the
chorus/vibrato selector from the existing button and LEDs to a nice, big
knob, which would make selection much quicker and more positive.
Turning
to the drawbars themselves, these don’t feel the same as a vintage
Hammond’s because they’re not connected to the electro-mechanical
gubbins of mid-20th century technology. You might think that this would
make them lighter in operation but, in fact, the converse is true; those
on the review unit need to loosen up a bit because you can’t flick them
in and out in the same way as on my A100.
The C2D, in a departure from the electronic drawbars offered by the C2, is equipped with 38 physical drawbars.
Changes to the (already excellent) Hammond emulation
include noticeable improvements to the percussion and the key-click.
Less significant is the change to the ‘key bounce’ (the relationship
between the speed at which you release a key and the loudness of the
resulting click) because, unless the key (on) click is far too loud for
my tastes, I hear little difference in the key (off) click. It would be
much more impressive to take advantage of the C2D’s velocity-sensitive
keyboards and model the slight spreading of the actuation of each of the
pitches in the registration as you play with lesser and lesser
velocity, as on a genuine Hammond. It would also be nice to see the
Hammond’s Normal/Soft loudness switch added to the panel. It may seem
trivial, but I sometimes find it useful to be able to flip a single
switch to reduce the volume by a fixed amount or, perhaps more usefully,
raise it (and therefore the amount of drive at the Leslie’s preamp) by
the same amount.
In addition to updating the
Hammond model, Clavia have added a new Leslie rotary speaker model and
tweaked the overdrive simulation, which can add anything from a gentle
purr to a heavily distorted scream. There are three Leslie options in
the Sound menu: a Leslie 122, a close-miked Leslie 122, and a Leslie 145
(which is mechanically the same as a 122 but housed in a smaller
enclosure). Despite a paucity of controls — for example, there are no
parameters for microphone placement, and just one for the fast and slow
speeds of each of the rotor and horn — the C-series’ rotary speaker
effects were always good. Happily, the C2D’s is considerably improved by
the addition of a rotor/horn balance parameter, variable from 70/30 to
30/70 in steps of 10. I find that genuine Leslies have much woodier
sounds than manufacturers of digital emulators tend to choose and, for
me, being able to set the C2D’s rotor/horn balance to 70/30 is a huge
improvement.
Let me offer an example: some
Hammonds ‘leak’ even when no notes are depressed. (Leakage is a
background sound caused when the pickup for one tonewheel ‘overhears’
stray signal from another tonewheel. This, together with the almost
inevitable broadband noise generated by the vintage electronics, helps
to give Hammond organs their characteristic, throaty quality.) By
selecting the Vintage 3 mode (the noisiest of the four underlying modes
for the Nord’s Hammond sounds) you can recreate a road-weary, battered
and leaky instrument on the C2D. Played through a preamp or one of the
non-rotary amplifier models, the higher frequencies of the leakage are
perhaps a little too noticeable but, when played through one of the
Leslie models with the rotor/horn balance leaning toward the rotor, the
effect is magical. My only gripe is that both the underlying model and
the choice of Leslie are global settings rather than preset-specific,
which is a great shame. Hmm... that’s not quite true. I have another
gripe, because Clavia still sell their half-moon switch as an optional
extra. Maybe I’m being greedy, but I feel that this should be part of
the standard package because you would rarely (if ever) play without
one.
Vox, Farfisa & Baroque Organs
Unlike
the Hammond model, the Vox emulation is not a perfect recreation of the
original, although the sound closely resembles the Vox Continental II.
Even further from the original, the Farfisa emulation remains evocative
rather than strictly accurate, and there seems to be a small bug in the
way that the STR16 and FLUTE8 tabs interact. It’s not a problem (I’ve
used Farfisas with much more significant faults), but it’s something
that Clavia could perhaps address in the next OS revision. What’s more,
using physical drawbars to emulate the switches on the Farfisa isn’t
ideal, and a more thorough make-over might have added tabs as well as
drawbars, although this would have resulted in greater size, weight and
cost, which I’m sure that Clavia wanted to avoid. Don’t misunderstand
me; both the Vox and Farfisa emulations are as good as they always were
but, in truth, I think that they are beginning to suffer a little in
comparison with the increasing quality of the Hammond emulation, so
maybe it’s time for Clavia’s engineers to re-address them and bring them
up to the same standard.
The 21 stops,
tremulants and various couplers of the baroque organ are — as far as
I can tell — the same on the C2D as on the C2, with one possible
exception. When reviewing the C2, I noted that the 8’ Principal in the
Great was not just an octave lower, it exhibited less harmonic content
than the 4’ Principal on the Swell. On the C2D, the 8’ Principal is the
brighter and more strident of the two. Have Clavia modified the samples
underlying the pipe organ? I must admit that I don’t know, and you
shouldn’t care. It still sounds superb, and that’s what matters.
Further Observations
At
the back of the C2D are three quarter-inch inputs for swell, rotary
control and sustain pedals, a USB port, MIDI I/O ports and an input for
a bass pedal (also on a five-pin DIN socket), a 3.5mm monitor input,
left, right and headphone outputs on quarter-inch jack sockets and,
finally, a high-level quarter-inch jack output and 11-pin socket for
driving a rotary speaker.
Elsewhere, the C2D continues to be identical with the
C2. For example, the I/O still comprises line-level stereo outputs,
high-level outputs (on quarter-inch and 11-pin connections)
for a genuine Leslie speaker, a headphones output, three control inputs,
MIDI In and Out, a USB socket for updating the OS and using the Sound
Manager (see box), and a dedicated MIDI input for bass pedals. The final
socket is a 3.5mm stereo input for monitoring external sources such as
MP3 players. Unfortunately, the C2D shares the C2’s inability to output
the audio received at this input other than through its headphone
socket, which was daft in 2010, and still is. On the bright side, the
C2D retains the C2’s ability to route the output from its Hammond
emulation to its dedicated Leslie outputs while sending its other organ
sounds to the standard quarter-inch outputs. This is an excellent
feature, and I would certainly want to take advantage of it on stage.
Mind you, I wouldn’t dream of taking a C2D on the road without a real
flightcase. The presence of the drawbars on the uppermost surface means
that it’s impossible to place a Minimoog on top of it or jump onto it
and soak up the adulation of the audience after a gig. It also means
that the drawbars are susceptible to damage and, although Clavia supply
a soft case for the C2D, a solid road-case would be a necessity, rather
than a luxury.
Any other negative thoughts I’ve
had about the C2D have been minor. For example, the effects knobs are
potentiometers rather than encoders, which means that when you load
a program, the values of the parameters will probably be different from
the knobs’ physical positions, so when you turn a knob, the parameter
jumps instantly to its current position. Not exactly a deal-breaker, is
it? Likewise, I’m not a fan of the Synth Bass because you have to use
the Shift key and menus to set it up. Big deal, huh? Talking of the bass
sounds, if you’ve just won the lottery, Clavia will happily sell you
their expensive Pedal Keys 27 pedalboard to accompany the C2D. Weighing
almost as much as the organ itself, this is a linear rather than radial
board, which seems a little odd, but it includes a swell pedal in the
right position, which is welcome.
Having
digested all of the above, you’re no doubt gagging to know whether the
C2D lives up to its billing as one of the best Hammond emulators ever
built. Fear not... When I carried out a careful comparison against my
A100 and Leslie 147, I was impressed. Hammonds and Leslies are wondrous
beasties, but I don’t gig with them because I hate moving them, and I’m
confident that neither the audience nor anyone in the band would hear
a difference if I used a C2D. Sure, I would notice the difference — the
actions of its manuals as well as its drawbars are a little heavier than
those of the vintage organ — but I’m confident that a few years’
hammering would loosen things up nicely. I only wish that I could play
one model (say, the Hammond) on one manual, and another (say, the
Farfisa) on the other. I can guess at why the current DSP architecture
would not support this, but it’s nice to dream.
Conclusions
Given
the quality of the existing Hammond emulation, and assuming that Clavia
will eventually update the Vox and Farfisa models, I wonder if it’s now
time for the company to turn their attention elsewhere. There are
numerous electronic organs that are not large Hammonds, Voxes or
Farfisas. So perhaps the most overlooked organs are now the ‘other’
family of Hammond tonewheel organs: the L-series so famously tortured by
Keith Emerson and allegedly used as the basis of the haunting pads in
Vangelis’s early music, and the T-series that provided the delicate
organ sounds of mid-period Genesis. These ‘Spinets’ have their
own character, and might be an excellent choice for the fifth organ in
the next generation of the C-series. While you’re at it, Mr Clavia,
please add a control that mimics the switching off and back on of the
organ to create the dramatic pitch-bends of the era. I can’t play
‘Stagnation’ from Genesis’s Trespass without it.
In
the meantime, it would be silly to claim that the Nords are anything
other than superb instruments. The Hammond emulation is better than
ever, and the Leslie simulation is much improved, to the extent that the
C2D may now be the most realistic of all the clonewheels. In addition,
the Vox and Farfisa models, while not perfect, remain highly valuable
additions, as does the lovely baroque organ. So why would you choose not
to buy one?
The answer lies in the way you
approach the Hammond. If you treat the drawbars as part of the playing
surface, the C2D is a step forward. If you don’t, the original C2 offers
the advantages of showing you the sound you’re about to play and
allowing you to modify it freely whenever you choose. Consequently,
I hope Clavia continue to supply both models. Each will have its fans,
especially since the new OS v2 for the C2 installs the Hammond organ and
Leslie 122 from the C2D, plus minor updates and bug fixes. If you
already have a C2, the original ‘Rotary B’ speaker model is sacrificed
to make way for the new features, but I still can’t imagine why you
wouldn’t rush to download the free update.
So,
to C2D or not to C2D? That is the question. If you want drawbars, the
answer is self-evident. If you’re an aficionado of the drawbuttons and
LEDs of the C2, yet prefer the sound of the C2D, you can have both.
I just hope that the price difference (the C2D is currently more
expensive than the C2) will diminish. If you’re undecided about which
way to jump, it currently makes the C2 look just a little too
attractive!
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