At the Messe 2007 Clavia announced their long awaited new synth of the Nord lead range, the Nord lead 4. The name says it all really. Buidling upon the award winning Nord lead 3 engine, a wide range of new features are introduced such as the ultrasaw waveform, complete user defined waveforms, keyzone and multi layered sampled wavefowrms, while keeping the full VA circuitry intact. Use any audio snip you like. If it can be saved as a standard wav file, it can be used as a sound source for the synthesizer. You now have the full expressiveness of the classic analog synthesizer combined with sample technology availible at your fingertips. The amount of voices is still undecided, as this depends largely on the final optimization phase of the processor code, but except somewhere between 40-60 voices.

What is shown in Frankfurt is an alpha model, meaning that all specifications are still subject to change. Some knobs and functions might disappear and/or extra knobs and functions might be added in a later stage of development.

The ultrasaw functions and sample functions are still under development, the aim being to make them as dynamic as possible. The Shape modulation function for oscillator two is still under development and there are many possible ways to let the Shape parameter dynamically influence both wavetables and samples. The final choice will be for the musically most useable type of modulation that will fit the computational resources of the hardware. What it will be is not yet decided.

Wavetables and samples can be downloaded by USB 2.0 and stored in flash memory. It is not decided yet how much flash memory will be in the synthesizer. VSTi integration plus a library of stock samples will be supplied. The VSTi integration allows to import .wav files and to operate the Nord lead 4 as a VST instrument inside your host.

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