JOE WALLACE: I’m Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com on the floor of NAMM 2007 in Anaheim, and I’m with Jason Stanfield for Nord. How are you?

JASON STANFIELD: Very good, sir. How are you?

JOE WALLACE: Good. Now, you have a new development in the Nord Kingdom, the Nord C3. It’s a combo organ.

JASON STANFIELD: Yes.

JOE WALLACE: Tell me about it.

JASON STANFIELD: Okay. Well first of all, the name is going to be C1, and we had a little bit of problem with Hammond but we resolved this and we’re going to change the name to C1 because we don’t want to step on their toes. They make a great product, and we certainly want to make sure that, you know, we respect them.

So, it’s actually the Nord C1 combo organ. It’s a dual manual organ that is based on the organ model of the Nord Electro and the Nord Stage series but it’s a dedicated organ so the compromises that had to be made before regarding the action so we can make space for the piano are no longer there. So, we now had the opportunity to flesh the organ out into something that’s a lot more accurate and a lot more realistic regarding especially the B3 model.

This does have a B3 model as well as a Vox and Farfisa model onboard. The rotary speaker, which is, you know, famous on the Nord Electro and the Nord Stage series is also available on this. It has a three-band EQ. It has a delay section, has reverb. It has a really nice growling overdrive which is nice.

Some really cool features about it, first of all it has a dedicated bass pedal input so you can use it with any other Roland, Fatar, or Hammond bass pedals. It actually has a setting inside there so it knows which bass pedal you’re using. If you’re not using it with bass pedals, you can press a button and your bass pedals can be part of the lower manual, so you can use it as a standalone or you can flesh it out into a larger system.

The other really cool feature is that it has the 11-pin rotary speaker connection, so when you connect this to something like a Motion Sound or a Leslie or any other rotary speaker with an 11-pin connection, the controls on this will control the actual spin of the actual amplifier.

We have a half-moon switch we’ll be selling as an accessory for it which will also control the internal or the external. So, there are a lot of options for this. Like I said, you can flesh it out for a really big system or you can use this as a standalone organ.

What makes this a really attractive organ is its weight. It’s only 33 pounds so it’s very, very portable. I think the next lightest one is 72 pounds, so you’re looking at less than half the weight of the next lightest organ clone out there. It’ll list for $3,600 and will be available in the States in April.

JOE WALLACE: Great. Now, there’s a lot of organ-related stuff coming out right now. We’ve got Hammond B3 emulators and Rhodes is getting back into the game. How does the B1?

JASON STANFIELD: The C1.

JOE WALLACE: The C1. How does the C1 fit into this sort of explosion of organ related releases lately?

JASON STANFIELD: I think where it really fits in is the fact that it is a dedicated performance instrument. It’s made for gigs. It’s made to take out on the road. You’ve got a lot of software plugins that sound great. However, not everyone wants to take a computer to a gig. The other clonewheels that are out there are nice. They sound great. But again, this is a whole lot lighter. Before, we didn’t have that kind of connectivity, especially regarding the 11-pin connection. Now we have that, so it’s something that especially churches that have got a Leslie in their church or blues clubs that have a Leslie there will be able to hook this up, and so anybody who has this can take it, drag it around, and connect it very easily to whatever the house amplifier is.

Another really nice thing about it is because we have the draw buttons on ours, all of our presets are actual presets. When you work with something that has physical drawbars, you call up a preset and then when you start adjusting the drawbars, that partial will jump where the drawbar is now coming from. So, you’ve got a little bit of stuttering that goes along when you play. With this one, yeah you’ve got buttons. It’s not physical drawbars that some of the purists kind of get a little annoyed at that at first but they get used to it. And eventually they say, “You know what, it works out for me,” and it works out very well. We’ve got settings on here to make the presets -- to make it a lot easier to get from one preset to another, especially with the live buttons so it’s like every preset actually has, you know, six presets built inside. So, I mean it really is nice. It really is quick to learn, very easy, very lightweight, and that’s where I think we’re going to come in. It’s just the portability factor of it. And it’s a great model, sounds awesome too. I mean I’ve had pros here all weekend and everyone is just saying that it’s amazing.

JOE WALLACE: Just one last question.

JASON STANFIELD: Sure.

JOE WALLACE: You know, there’s plenty of trends. Everything goes in big cycles in the industry and the cycle is coming back towards the organ again. Why do you think that is? Do you think that that’s just the way things when in happenstance or is there a trend in music right now that’s preferring that sound? What do you think that’s causing the resurgence?

JASON STANFIELD: I think two things. Namely, there are players that used to back in the day in the ‘60s and ’70s haul these big kind of Hammond organs around and eventually they got out of playing it because it was too much for them to carry around, it’s too much to deal with, and now they’re doing other things. Now, they’re older and they want to get back into playing and they don’t have the opportunity unless they get something like this. They see this and they say, “Oh, now I can go out and play.” The other one I think which is even bigger is the fact that there are a lot of younger artists out there that like that classic sound. I mean every band wants to kind of emulate somebody that they were influenced by. The bands now are influenced by the sounds of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Hammond Organ was a big part of that. So, they want to get into that but at the same time they don’t want to get into sourcing these old instruments. They don’t know if it’s going to work. It’s expensive, it’s heavy, you got to fix it all the time, you got to drag it around, so they want to be able to get into these classic sounds without getting into all the classic headaches. And so, something like the C1 would be perfect for them because they can have that accurate Hammond, accurate Vox and Farfisa sound without the commitment of having three giant heavy organs on stage.

JOE WALLACE: Great. We’ve been talking about the Nord C1 at the Nord booth. I’m Joe Wallace on the floor of NAMM 2007 for Gearwire.Com.