NAMM: Anaheim, Calif. (MuseWire) – When lightweight and portability is as important as sound quality and flexibility, Nord Keyboards introduces the all new Nord Piano 88. With an impressive response and functionality this keyboard takes you one step further towards the ultimate stage piano. The Nord Piano is a dedicated stage piano with 88 keys and a weighted hammer action. It is designed with the performing musician in mind and very lightweight at approx. 18 kg (39.6 lbs), without compromising build quality, sound quality or means of expression. As all the other Nord units, it is designed with a firm focus on extremely fast response and accessibility of every important function from the panel.

With a well designed user interface, it doesn’t matter if you want to prepare your settings in advance and save them for later use, or if you’d rather set the sounds and effects as you go along – the Nord Piano delivers in both these aspects. There are plenty of memory locations in a bank/program configuration to provide you with a quick access from the panel, to your favorite sounds.

You can quickly adjust the velocity response to suit your playing style with a dedicated control on the panel. A Key Transpose setting are equally adjustable, by either saving a transpose setting to your program or by setting a transposition value in real time from the panel.

The Nord Piano comes equipped with several acoustic and electric pianos and harpsichords. Other pianos are available as free downloads from the Nordkeyboards.com website. The sounds are stored in a Flash memory with a 512 MB capacity. This allows you to replace every piano if you wish and the sounds are kept intact in the memory even when the unit is turned off, no loading time is necessary.

As always with Nord downloads, the sounds are available for free and easily exchanged by using the Nord Sound Manager application, which runs on Mac OSX, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 computers. The Nord Sound Manager allows you to quickly organize your programs according to your needs and allows you to create backups of the entire content in your Nord Piano.

One of the Nord missions is to deliver more, in every aspect. Using the Nord Resonance Ready pianos (e.g. the R-labeled Grand’s and Upright’s), you can activate the Resonance feature on the panel, which will add this wonderful acoustic phenomenon to the Nord sound. The Nord crew has gone to great lengths to ensure an accurate reproduction of the acoustic resonance, using the actual sound of the source instrument in an extremely realistic way.

Pricing and availability, to be announced.