Nord Boss Morten Ness: The Key Is to Understand What Musicians Really Want

Before becoming CEO of Nord, resp. Clavia company, did you have any experience with their instruments?

I started working in retail, and then I went on to work for two different distribution companies. So I was working with a Nord distributor in Norway when I started the job as a sales manager for Nord.

What drove you to the music instruments industry? Are you also a musician or music producer, or was it more about the sales business in general?

I wouldn't say I am a "proper musician", but I've played the keyboard since I was like twelve years old, I played in different bands – the last time I played the keyboard in a band was in 2001. I did at some point realise that I am not a huge fan of rehearsing and that I am more into producing and recording other people. So for many years, I had a recording studio. I also thought that the studio was cool. I was able to combine the studio with having a full-time job in retail and then later distribution.

Have you followed the development of Nord products from the very beginning?

Yes, absolutely. The first Nord Lead came out in 1995, I started work in retail in 1998, so they were around. I remember when the Electro came out in 2002, then the Nord Stage in 2005 and it was kind of a "strange" product among all the Yamaha, Roland, Korgs etc. All those black and silver workstations, pianos and keyboards. And suddenly, there was a small company from Sweden, coming out with something red – it was strange at the beginning.

Lead 1 was the first virtual analogue synth on the market. People were used to analogue Moog, Oberheim and Sequential synths, where you can tweak sounds, but you can never save them. So the big thing with the Lead was its ability to actually save the sound that you just created and recall it later. So that was the beginning of virtual analogue synths. That was big. The Electro had a proper Hammond organ clone in a keyboard that weighed less than 10 kilos. That was a game-changer.

I was in the distribution process when things started getting really big – when the Nord Stage 2 came out in 2011-12. That was when people started noticing Nord keyboards. Professional players were using them. So that was a milestone.

What did the Clavia company do differently to achieve such success in such a short time?

Good question. One of the key things is that most people in the company are musicians – and also engineers. They fully understand what musicians really want. Just the attention to the quality of the sounds, the extremely low latency and the immediacy of all the buttons and knobs, that's what we call menu diving. You can do everything on the fly. The initial thinking before the first Electro came out, was that a lot of guitar players want to have only one pedal, want to plug it in the amp – and that's it. They want to express themselves through playing the instrument, they are not into all those gadgets and so – as well as keyboard players, they want Hammond sound, electric pianos, upright and acoustic pianos. You can, of course, throw in all the cool synth sounds, brass and string instruments and stuff like that. But the base is keyboard instruments. If you look at someone like Benmont Tench from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, he would always have a Hammond B3 organ, a proper acoustic upright, and they have at least one or two electric pianos – that's four keyboards.

So it was fundamental to get all that in one small package. And to stick with that philosophy – keep things simple, very immediate. By the way, the original owner Hans Nordelius is still in the Nord company, still doing the design, and always wanting to keep things simple and very immediate. So if you want to turn on an effect, there is a button for that effect. You don't have to "go to the menu, find page seven". I think people like that.

Of course, there are people who would sit down at Nord keyboards for the first time and feel confused by all those buttons and blinking lights and say: "I don’t understand anything. "But as soon as you take a little closer look, you realise: "Ok, on Nord Stage, there is an organ section, a piano section and a synth section." These three individual instruments. So if you never use the organ, focus on the piano. If you only use the organ – do that. And I think that's something that sets the company and the products apart from the competition: to have these three separate instruments within one keyboard.

Still, I am wondering, why Nord was so unique or successful at first. Were they just quicker in their innovations and technologies? Did they have an opportunity to have better sounds and samples, as well as access to technologies, is it also one of the reasons?

Well, certainly, recognising what keyboard players wanted is important to begin with. And then there is the thing of having some unique people – someone, who is a visionary. Hans was a visionary with this part right here of creating these separate instruments and making sure that there are separate entities on the panel. And having the luck of finding someone like Björn, who has created the organ engine, someone like Magnus, who's still there, and head of the software department to create that ecosystem where all these things are handled within the same hardware package.

And it's very different than the 90s. The other companies would do huge displays and focus on getting a nice display, touch display, touch screen, where you can navigate to all these parameters, and it was a lot more flexible. I mean, the argument could be made, and certainly so by people that our instruments are not very flexible, but they keep you to the basis.

And the design philosophy has always been, that it's easy to add a new feature. If you and I were to sit down and just come up with a list of new features that we would like to have, it could be three pages in half an hour. That's not the hard part. The hard part is deciding which features we can actually put on the panel, which features we need to have here, and how many parameters or features we can just take away.

Are there any features that were given up after a few years?

On a general basis, we went from a drum company. We manufactured digital drums and then turned into a synthesiser company and then we gradually moved from being a synthesiser company into more stage piano company. So I think a lot of the features that we had in products like the Lead 3 (the modular G2 instruments), are features that we realised are only for a small part of the market. Most people would like to have a fabulous grand piano, an upright piano, electric piano sounds – and an organ, of course. And then all these other crazy synth ideas don't necessarily have to be in that type of instrument.

And I think we've also been trying to simplify this synth section – on an instrument like the Stage 4 – and try to make it easier by offering configurations of FM synthesis, pre-configured oscillators and stuff like that. It’s a very powerful and flexible synth, but we’re giving users a great starting point so you don’t have to tweak everything from the bottom up. So I think simplifying is definitely stuff like that. Some of these early synths had a microphone input for a vocoder because everyone wanted to have a vocoder… This is something that just disappeared because it was really for a very small segment of the market.

Let's focus on keyboard mechanics itself. The organ players would maybe prefer this, like light, quick keys with a quick response, but classical pianists who would really need to "feel" the instrument, want a "real" keyboard. So how did the story with Kawai come up on the scene?

There are a number of reasons. The TP 40 which we use in the Nord Stage is a very good keyboard. It's very stable. But I totally get what you say about classical pianists wanting to have a proper hammer action keyboard with proper hammers. There's a lot of playing technique. There's a lot of musicality in that way of playing it.

We like the Kawai products. And we had a conversation with them a few years before we released the Nord Grand in 2019. Not much came out of it. And then we were cleaning out some storage space in 2018 and there was a very early prototype that had the Kawai keyboard in it, and it looked very different. One of the design ideas behind that was a very small display with very few buttons. It was this instrument that was sitting against the wall, and our manufacturing manager said: "What happened to this one? It never happened. Why?"

Kawai usually doesn't work with anyone else. It‘s one of the greatest keyboard manufacturers in the world. They make fabulous pianos and grands. Kawai is a very esteemed and highly respected company. And we talked to them like: "Well, you have a great keyboard. We would like to do something with it." And you know, they have their own stage pianos, digital panels as well. But somehow we found common ground. It’s good for us because they had a fabulous keyboard, and maybe they thought it would be good marketing for them. So that's how the Grand came about.

Is the Virtual Hammer Action technology also part of Kawai technology, or is it something that was invented especially for Nord?

The Virtual Hammer Action technology was invented for the TP 40. We used it for the Nord Piano series. The TP 40 also has a hammer of course, but the hammer hangs underneath the key, instead of in front of the key. The distance from the sensor to the pivot point is different from the Kawai. When you're pressing the key, you're pressing the hammer, but it's the key that triggers the sensors.

With the Kawai, it's actually the hammer that triggers the sensors. A very quick hit on a key will move the hammer even if you don't press the key all the way to the bottom so you can still trigger the sound and you'll feel the weight of the hammer in your fingertips in a different way on the Grand 2 than you would on a Nord Piano or Nord Stage.

Sometimes the crucial moment is not when you press the key, but when – or how – you release it. It’s important when you play quick staccato or non-legato, for example. What happens if the key is released quickly? Can you influence this in the settings? Not how hard you press the keys, but how quickly they go back up.

The only thing that you can influence there would be the velocity curve from medium to heavy, which means, how hard you have to slam the key to reach the highest level. But no, the actual mechanics are the way they are. And this is a result of us talking to a lot of keyboard players about which type of weight, or how heavy the hammers should be. It's always going to be a lot of taste and personal preference. Some people think it's too light. Some think it's too heavy… But I think people hopefully like it.

To what extent can users influence technologies or have new thoughts? Do you also take customers' suggestions and comments into account during the development process?

Yes, we do, absolutely. There's the official Nord user forum that has over 30,000 members. There is a Facebook group that has 120,000 members. We of course cannot monitor or read every comment about every topic, but we do know what's being talked about.

 We also have a team of beta testers who always give us feedback from early prototypes. They'll give us feedback on anything from the layout of the panel, the features that are included, the whole user experience, and of course, with something like the Grand back in 2018-19, they were giving us feedback on the keyboard itself.

So yeah, we constantly get that feedback from the market. It's really important for us. I think it's really important to listen to people who are using this professionally as an everyday tool.

Do you also sometimes build custom-made instruments for players who represent the company?

The answer is: No, we don’t do that. We do get a lot of requests for it. We have gotten requests for years. People want custom features. They want custom keyboards. They want custom colours. For us, it's very simple: This is what we do. I'm sure there are artists who would be big enough and would assume that they would be entitled to something different. But for us, it's very, very simple: No, this is what we do – we don't do that. 

And it means also that if you're an artist, you're touring around the world, and there's a rental company that has one of our keyboards, they are built to the exact same standards on all accounts. So whenever you're touring in Australia, South America, Europe or the US, you can find an instrument which is exactly like the one that you have at home.

Did some of the famous musicians who own and play Nord instruments, surprise you the way they use them? I mean, in an innovative way.

 would say that all of them surprise us all the time with stuff they can do. And actually one of the most satisfactory things for us to see is musicians playing – seeing the instruments in the hands of keyboard players. But if you see the Nord live sessions, for instance, you'll see that there are a lot of fabulous musicians in all genres and types of music. It's really impressive to see what they can do with it. And a lot of times they would use a certain feature, part of the instruments, in ways that we've never thought about. So it's all very inspiring.

Since you started working for Nord, how would you say the requirements and preferences of customers and players have changed?

Well, I would say that since the spring of 2020, the start of COVID-19, the whole market, distribution and retail game has been very unpredictable. We had everything come to a complete stop in the spring and summer of 2020 because no one knew what was going on or where the world would go and then huge demands, lack of supplies and supply chain problems came. The whole semiconductor industry was on its knees because everybody wanted their products and they couldn't ship them. So it's been very different. I think, when people were not spending money on vacations and going to restaurants because they couldn't fly anywhere or eat out, they were more susceptible to spending money on instruments and buying more high-end instruments.

But now with the increased interest rates and diminishing purchasing power, people are trying to find ways of cutting costs. If you want to get an instrument, maybe you'll have to get an instrument that's not the one you wanted the most, but that will still satisfy what you need. So I think that buying habits have changed sort of all over the place. I think it depends on where people are at with their economy. I think that affects it a lot.

Do you see some differences between, for example, the American and European markets?

Most markets have things that are slightly different. But we only see a tiny part of the world, because we only see the products that we sell. Of course, there are economic challenges and differences that may affect how people purchase stuff like musical instruments. But there are more similarities than differences around the world. The market in Australia is not so different from the market in the Czech Republic or the US.

And how do you perceive the current position of the Nord brand on the global market?

We're still a tiny brand in a tiny fragment of a small category of instrument, which is keyboards. We're not going to be a big company that does instruments in all price ranges and all instrument categories. We're trying to stick to what we think we do pretty well – which is our stage pianos – to build them in a way to make sure that they have the highest quality of craftsmanship, and of course, high-quality sounds and to expand what we do. But we still try to be in that niche.

We recently released the Spitfire string library, something that probably wouldn't have been possible a few years back, but I think we've gotten to a position where people see Nord as an aspirational brand. And it gives us opportunities to offer an even better product because we can cooperate with a company like Spitfire, which we both see as mutually beneficial marketing. But we're not going to branch into doing other instrument categories or stuff like that. We're trying to stick with what we think we do well.

As well as not having factories in other countries…

The thing is, we still manufacture everything in central Stockholm. We have the RD department. We have the manufacturing in the same building. They're one floor apart, and it's been a major strength of the company to have that closeness of manufacturing and development. If something goes wrong, it's very easy to handle it, and I don't think that we could ever handle having a factory overseas.