Product Review - Clavia Nord Electro 4

Reviews : Keyboard

Clavia’s updated Electro range prove that if you need top-quality staple keyboard sounds, playability and simplicity, Nords still lead.

Gordon Reid

You’ve got to respect the number of ways that Clavia have found to repackage their piano, organ, synthesis and sample playback technologies, even though this means that the differences between products boil down largely to which combination is included in each. The original Electro was the company’s first foray into the realms of pianos and organs and, despite the more recent inclusion of sample playback, this is where the series has remained. Think of an Electro as a Nord Piano plus organs, or a Nord organ plus pianos, or a Nord Stage minus the synthesizer, and you won’t go far wrong.

There are three models in the Electro 4 range. The 4D SW61 and SW73 offer waterfall keyboards with 61 and 73 keys respectively, while the 4HP incorporates a hammer-action 73-key unit. Each of these offers updates with respect to its equivalent in the Electro 3 range, although, if you look carefully, you’ll see that many of these first appeared on the Electro 3HP, which was launched between the original Electro 3 series and the Electro 4 series.

The Improvements

It’s easy to create an über-Mellotron on an Electro using the bundled Sound Manager and Clavia’s huge sample library.

I’ve discussed the operation of Clavia’s keyboards in the past, so there’s no point in regurgitating everything here. To read about this, please refer to the reviews listed in the ‘Nord Keyboards In Sound On Sound’ box. Today, I’ll concentrate on the changes that mark the evolution of the Electro 3 into the Electro 4.

When Clavia introduced the Nord C2D, they upgraded its Hammond organ model and improved its rotary speaker effect. I reviewed the C2D in 2012, and concluded that its Hammond emulation was Clavia’s best yet, and arguably the most realistic available. Happily, all of these improvements have been incorporated into the Electro 4 series.

The other major new facility that’s common to all the models is MIDI over USB. Mac users can plug the keyboard into the computer, whereupon it will be recognised without further ado. Windows users require a hardware driver, but they’ll find this on the bundled DVDs, so that’s no problem. Unfortunately, you can’t use MIDI over the traditional five-pin sockets and USB simultaneously; you have to select one or the other in the MIDI menu.

Published in SOS May 2013