Nord Stage 3 vs. Yamaha CP88

welcome back to Milan recording studios, my name is James Pablo Shawcross and in today's video I will make a comparison between two iconic and somewhat similar keyboards, the

yamaha

CP 88 or as I have heard some people refer to it. the black Nord and the real Nord the big red the Nord

stage

3 now, the first thing we're going to jump right into this review is the build quality. Build quality is something very important to keep in mind when you are. buy a keyboard, especially if you are going to pay this amount of money for it, so the

yamaha

CP 88 seems to have a good build quality, as does the Nord Stage 3.

The top is metal. The top is metal. The front here and the bottom are metal. Same here, we have very attractive wood on the sides and on this I think it's metal, so at first glance and also at first touch, you would believe the build quality of both. It would be the same though, I spent about a day with the Nord Stage three and two things broke right out of the box, one of them is literally broken and the other is an inherent problem with the Nord State Three. I'm sure they are all the same, the CP 88 hasn't given me any problems.

I have used many other brands of keyboards for many years that didn't give me any problems when I was very young. I think I had a Yamaha P 80. I used it a lot and there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. I used my Korg SV one right behind me for several years practicing very hard every day for many hours a day and nothing failed even though I heard the key beds in They are not reliable. Mine is perfectly fine. I have used a kowai MP 11 se for several years, maybe around a year or two and now I play very hard with it every day and have had no problems with it.

I've used it for a day and practiced for about an hour or maybe an hour and a half and two things were wrong so that's something I want to point out that they have some issues with so let me give you a rundown. Summary of what the problems are. The first is a problem with these pull up bars here, as you can see, when I try to take them out, it escapes and hides in its little hole. Let me show you what's going on there, so here it is. a close up of the problem I've basically been having with the Nords wave drawing our button system.

If you press this, it moves the drawbar in and turns it off. If you press this, it moves the drawbar outward and pushes it. If you hold it down the drawbar zooms in and if you hold it down as soon as the drawbar comes out this is where I'm having trouble as you can see it's off if I press it it starts to go up and it goes away because it What happened is that this button down here, the one that pushes it into the mechanism, broke and the system thinks that this button is being held down even when I'm pressing this one, and I can replicate that here if I hold it down. this pressed button does exactly the same thing, but it's not actually broken.

This one here is broken and if you listen closely you'll hear that it doesn't click the same way. This one does check it and sometimes it works well. but as soon as you press the button down it misbehaves again, which I find completely unacceptable that a $4,500 instrument after about an hour and a half of play and maybe a day out of the box is already having problems. I was really looking forward to using the Nord and having it become part of the studio, it has a lot of interesting sounds. It really opened the doors for me to use a lot of interesting sounds in my music, but this is going to be something I don't want.

There is nothing to do with this, so I will return this keyboard as soon as I finish this video series and will not receive another one. The other problem I have with the Nord Stage 3 is related to the action. which is another thing I wanted to talk about, neither of these actions are perfect and they are on opposite ends of the spectrum, the Nord Stage 3, although advertised as having a fully weighted hammer action keyboard, is nowhere near fully weighted. weighted. I'm surprised if there's actually a hammer there and it probably is there and it's a very, very light and unrealistic feeling.

The Yamaha CP 88 has wooden side keys, which it does not. They are all plastic, as expected. The Yamaha CP 88 has wooden keys. and they are a bit heavier than most pianos would be, so this is probably one of the heaviest actions I have played, however I have had no problems with it. This same glitch on the Nord Stage three doesn't happen on the Yamaha CP 88 I. I'll tell you about that bug in a second and the action here seems to be pretty reliable and has no problem doing anything I throw at it, it's just a bit heavier so a slight adjustment is needed when playing on the CP 88, this glitch I mentioned involves the action and is a bit specific but for me it is very important because it shows why a realistic action is important in a keyboard and why it shouldn't be traded as a fully weighted stock. only part of the reason why it's extremely light in the first place but a real piano wouldn't do this if you play a note twice in a row or just repeatedly it will generally play one of the notes extremely loudly at random and will not be able.

Do it every time, but it seems to do it on every note on the keyboard, more specifically in this range, here, ironically, right where the drawbar problem is, but it's unrelated, so let me give you a close up. about that too because it's interesting the problem I'm having here with the keyboard while I was demonstrating it to you. If you play the notes twice in a row very quickly, almost in the same seconds, then the note suddenly becomes very very loud. I've heard of this bug before in a similar situation on other keyboards and I'm a little sad to say it's a thing here up north, now I'm bothering with this.

C sharp here, but it happens in every key of the instrument. It's a little harder to do in the lows and highs, but it can be done if I do it in this C here. It should after a while. I don't always do it if you don't get it right, but it will again be for some reason that C seems to want to do it, but I've tried it before on many other notes and it does it again too. It is easier to do with black notes than white notes and why exactly this problem occurs. I can't really tell you more than I guess the sensor that is under the key or in front of the hammer, wherever it is, must be scared if the sensor activates twice as fast and just lowers the note it is very loud now in case you think I'm manually playing the note so loud to actually make it that loud is almost impossible, I don't think it's as loud as the note is when it gets scared it looks even louder.

I liked. I did it twice in a row when you said that's good. Even when I play the note really loud it's not as loud as when it freaks out, so that's the problem I'm having with the Nord

stage

3, it just doesn't have great action, there are other things I like, the piano sounds , I'll get to that in a minute, but the action is really Big disappointment and I'm very disappointed with it, even if I didn't fix this problem I would still be disappointed because it's too light and fake feeling, but that problem just makes it worse so Those are the two problems I have.

I've been having it with the Nord Stage 3 and I'm going to get rid of it and return it ASAP because I feel like one day I'll go into the studio and it will explode into pieces everywhere. the floor, so while the build quality appears to be high, I bet corners are being cut somewhere. I mean, it's a hand-assembled instrument, but when you pay $4,500 for a keyboard, it should at least last longer than that day and I'm very disappointed in that. I had high hopes and was very excited for the Nord Stage 3 because I heard so many wonderful things about the Nord on the internet that I really expected great things from it, but it is probably the most disappointing piano money can buy, especially in this price range , the damper pedal that comes with it is kind of cheap and flimsy, plus it's not the best pedal unit you can get and instead of coming with a stand, it comes with something like a cheap canvas cover II that has lines of fold that will never come out.

I'd rather have a music stand, but hey, they gave you a cover, so that's my take on the Nord Stage 3 that I'm going to review. my full and in-depth review too because when I first unboxed it I was very excited and surprised. The piano sounds, I'm not going to lie, are very high quality, so that surprised me a lot and I was willing to overlook the fact that the action was extremely light if the rest was high quality, but I soon realized I realize this drawbar was broken and there are inherent flaws in the action itself, so that's it, but I mentioned the piano sound. here it's very good and it's very good so let me give you a demo of that you you so it's kind of a sound comparison between the Yamaha CP 88 and the Nord stage 3.

Now I'm disappointed because I'm on the I .I guess it's the build quality of the Nord stage 3. I'm willing to say they have a really great piano sound, it's warm and soft in the right places, it has really great string resonance, it sounds amazing now. I think it's too bright and it's too easy to play the notes too bright, so sometimes one of them stands out a little bit and sounds quite unrealistic, but overall it has a really good piano sound, but you got it. I have to keep in mind that this costs twice as much as it is, so the fact that this one is a little brighter and a little thinner doesn't really disappoint me much, what disappoints me more is the fact that the construction The quality on this isn't as high as it is here, if Nord spent as much time making sure his instruments came out of the factory alive as he did making sure the piano sounded alive then we'd have something to talk about, but leave me alone.

I play the piano a little bit more because I really like it compared to here. That's not so bad either. It sounds pretty good. It's a little thinner than some of the Nord Stage 3's base registers, but. It also has a really nice damper resonance and really sounds good. One thing I find interesting is that the default sound is spectacular. The default sound on the Nord Stage 3 sounds like it's a much smaller piano than the one below. Look at the bass end on this one. bad boy compared to down here that sounds like a nine foot piano recording.

I can't really say that it actually sounds like a nine foot piano because in person no keyboard can replicate that so far with the current one. technology, but up here it sounds more like a recording of a soft 7 foot piano that almost sounds like some of the notes are out of tune, just one thing I noticed from the get-go and I'm trying to figure out Did they record the piano and it was a little out of tune or is it just my ears, but I don't have it working with any chorus effects, but or is that really pure?

This is not especially so, which is very strange, but the The low bass sounds like a small, stubby seven-footer, whereas now it sounds like a recording of a nine-foot grand piano, while the sound differences in the CP 88 and the Nord Stage 3 in the acoustic piano category are basically night and day. Stage 3 is the CP 88 twin when it comes to the Rhodes sound. I'm really surprised at how identical they sound, especially in certain registers, they're almost indistinguishable, which I find really interesting. Let me do a demo for you, I need to activate this. actually because for some reason on virtually all keyboards the road sounds are louder than the piano sounds and if I keep playing like that it won't be good for the audio experience so it was a bit of sand between the seat 88. and the Road sounds from stage three of the north here there's a little bit more right after that, a little bit too much there, but as you can hear a sound, if they are almost identical in this sound, it just says a little bit softer , but if you go down here to the midrange it's exactly the same sound sample this one has a little less volume response when you hit the loudest note it doesn't really get hit quickly this one really hits that so it has punchiness which is a little bit annoying, but other than that the sound of these is very similar, the base is much better and the treble very high, what do we have here? range and high I guess the tenor range almost sounded exactly the same to me, which is really interesting, although this one here, when you play the note a little bit louder, it starts to get that really cool punchy sound that this one doesn't like. do this one which does it right away which is a plus in my opinion both keyboards also have organ sounds as I mentioned I'm having some technical difficulties here with that top drawbar and it's a shame because one of the best things about the Nord Stage 3 is that it has these traction bars.

The compact version of this, the 73-key version, has real manual drawbars, but it also has an even less realistic action. I don't even think thathave tried. Make it like a piano because they thought the synth and organ guys would buy these smaller sized keyboards, so the small 73 key version has manual pull bars, but this, like the 76 key, has buttons that, if this wouldn't have failed, I'd honestly be giving a glowing review because I really like how they work, other than the buttons failing. Nord actually designed these nice Well, you hold down the button to go all the way in and out and you tap it once to go all the way in and out.

I would prefer manual pull up bars and I really don't know why they don't include them. To be honest with you, they are at full size stage 3, but it is a very good alternative. The b3 sound here also tends to be a little loud, so if they're already turned down from before and the speed of the Leslie and the Leslie. the speed is controlled by the switch here and the Leslie simulator I believe is derived from the cloned Nord c2d wheel organ which doesn't sound too bad, unfortunately here in DCP 88 you don't have drawbar controls but we do have some sounds organ here.

If I can find a record and the workload for here, which I don't think it will be, let's remove some of the bass sounds, so that was a little taste of the organ sounds on Nord Stage three, now one. What the Nord Stage Three has that the CP 88 almost doesn't is synth, so if you're looking for a keyboard that sounds good with a synth, I guess this would be an option. I can't really say I would. I fully recommend it as far as synths go. I suposs you are well. I don't know much about senses, but it does a lot of cool things and you also have a bunch of synth presets in here, but there's also a huge amount of customization you can do with it, you can combine waves, you can select a bunch of different waves, combine them, modulate them and do all kinds of really cool things with it, honestly some of the presets here that are really fantastic, this is one of my favorites.

I love the sound of it and I'll really miss it when I get rid of this keyboard because I really wanted to use it somehow on some musical stuff. It sounds really cool, so if you like synths, I guess that's it. an option for you and if I didn't have any of those technical difficulties with it I would actually quite recommend the Nord stage 3 but this whole drawbar thing isn't great for the price you pay and the action certainly is. It's not great for the price you pay. I can't think of a logical reason why they put in a non-piano-like action, other than two reasons: one, they wanted to keep it light and thin and put a wooden key action on it. doesn't exactly help keep an instrument light and thin, although Yamaha somehow managed to make these two keywords practically the same weight, but the other reason I have to imagine it is because again it has an excellent organ section and the very powerful synth section that they thought many people would use this instrument again.

I pressed those keys by accident. Sorry, but they probably thought that a lot of people who have been playing since then and who play organs would buy this and wouldn't like a full version. weighted key bed, however, even in the Nordics there are more piano-based things, like their new grand piano, that don't come with a terribly panel-like action, whether in the Nordic grand piano, they actually They teamed up with Kawai, who does some of the best stage action in the world. panels which is the grand feel and on Nords the new grand it would make sense to use the grand feel action well, they didn't, they used the rh3 which is not bad but the Kauai grand feel action is much better than the rh3.

It's really amazing, so even in the New Nordic rant that doesn't have any of the organs or since I think if it does it doesn't have a dedicated section for any of them, they're just there for fun. Grand also doesn't have an amazing action, so for the price which is better, I would say I have to go for this EP 88. This is a more powerful keyboard and does more things than the synth. section you have the organ section, you can divide the keyboard into four zones and combine things and run your own samples through it and there is also a sample library and you can transfer things freely.

It's got a lot of cool stuff, but I don't really like the action, especially with that bug I mentioned where if you tap No, it's twice in the same second, to get it right there, it makes it strong and something you have to do like 20 times. and all. Suddenly he'll do it four times in a row, but I don't like that. I never liked the action on this to begin with, but I was willing to put up with it if the rest of the keyboard was really awesome and even the drawbar broke, but now I realized that the drawbar doesn't work right, it's not well I'm really disappointed with this and it doesn't come with the music stand, this one doesn't come with it either so they're pretty even in that regard but a lot of people compare it to the North and I can definitely see why because the UI is inspired in it and there are some other things that are eerily similar to the Nord likes the fact that it doesn't come with music;

It doesn't come with a triple pedal unit, it comes with a single pedal unit and the unboxing experience was pretty similar for both as well, but I definitely hope Yamaha doesn't do that. I am no longer inspired by Nord and I continue to cheapen their keyboards because this quality is quite good and as I said, I have had very good luck with Yamaha in the past, as well as other brands, but Yamaha for me has been a really reliable brand. so I definitely hope Yamaha doesn't start making things cheaper like Nord has done with the action and I guess with the wiring or the button mechanisms or something because that's not cool, but especially when you're paying $4,500 for this , it should work fine for many years, this here is about half the price and I would bet money it would last many years, I could be wrong because you never really know about those things, but I have had a lot of luck with Yamaha in the past, they have been very reliable, they are like the Toyota of the keyboard world.

Toyota The Japanese manufacturer is known for being very reliable. Yamaha is a Japanese manufacturer and is known to be very reliable, so stop comparing Yamaha to Nord and start comparing them to Toyota, that's a comparison I like better. I hope you enjoyed this review at least as much as you can because it was filled with a bit of negativity and I'm sorry. but I really try to keep my channel as honest as possible and sometimes when I unpack something or when I check it out for the first time I'm surprised at how good it is, but sometimes the more time you spend with them the more you love them. and sometimes the more time you spend with them the more you dislike them, sadly that's the case with

nord

stage 3 again.

I still like the sound of the piano and I still say it's really cool, but is it worth $4,500? I don't know you. Guys, decide, let me know what you think in the comments section below. I say no, I'd rather have a CP 88 than a Nord Stage 3, especially with the build quality issues, but anyway, I think it's about time I finished the video, so I really hope you enjoyed this video as much as they could. If they did, they might not visit my channel and watch some of my other videos. I've done a lot of reviews on keyboards, organs, acoustic pianos, and all sorts of other cool stuff.

Unfortunately, I don't think there will be any more Nord products on this channel unless they magically appear in my studio because I'm not going to spend my own money on them again, but you should definitely think about subscribing because there will be a couple more videos with this guy appearing before for me to give it back so if you like it you might want to think about subscribing if you subscribe thank you very much and I'll see you in the next video bye.