Pianoteq vs Nord pianos

first question . Pianoteq is also my favourite virtual instrument because you can shape the sound to your liking and have a level of control of notes on an incredible number of parameters which are relevant for players used to acoustic pianos and familiar with tuning . On the other hand , sampled libraries are more plug and play and accessible to users less familiar with tuning.
But Nord Pianos are something relatively unique in their market segment which live gigging musicians .there are a lot of imperfections related to Nord but they are necessarily relevant for live gigging in jazz/rock band

The con’s first
Forget about una corda pedal , let-off simulation , complex sympathetic resonance and pp samples . Nord doesn’t care about it for the pianos are going to be used in noisy environments in the context of a live set

Not the best actions of the market . A part the  Nord Grand 1/2 which are equipped with Kawai excellent RH3 action all the other actions are Fatar actions , which are quite average actions but not so many brands sell actions . Probably Nord makes a huge margin on that particular component of their keyboard.

The Pro’s now

First of all , they have developed an image based on the Red colour, which is quite effective as playing one you are part of the club. One should never have been underestimate the power of symbols in branding . ( Roland recent vstage keyboard is definitely trying to compete with the Nord stage 4 including the red color)

Secondly they offer a vast library of sound accessible to every user (for free) . Even  vastly inferior to Pianoteq  for solo piano in studio / home recording , they sound nice , although quite compressed and are really top notch for the target audience .

Above all,  they have developed a user interface on the keyboards with the knobs and buttons which the reference for live musicians .

To cut a long story short , the targeted user segment is different . In the sale way you cannot compare domino’s pizzas to Michelin restaurants, you cannot compare Modartt with Nord , given their strategy & markets are différents .

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True, the initial differences between Modartt and Nord are clear, but I’m still intrigued. The reality is that, even on this forum, I’ve read several times about people trying to emulate Nord sounds using Modartt. In other words, they are dealing with sound itself, not just brand image, marketing, and so on. When they want to praise how good a particular Pianoteq patch sounds, they say things like, “it sounds like such-and-such a patch on my Nord.” This suggests that, in terms of sound, Modartt’s pianos and Nord’s are ultimately not that far apart, and that the potential customers for both can sometimes be the same.

I think you should play on the piano that inspires you the most, In my studio I use three piano keyboards, a nord stage 4, a korg kronos 88, a native komplete s88 mk3 connected to a lot of piano libraries including pianoteq 9 pro.

In my case I got inspired the most when playing on the nord stage 4, everytime I play on that keyboard I got inspired right away. I don't care about the brand or the color or that people want to be with a club, for me the most important part is the sound and the connected feel to the keyboard with that sound. That is were nord shines for me.

The RH3 keyboard of the korg kronos is also a nice keyboard and it fits the SGX engine of the kronos very well, but I prefer the feeling of the Fatar TP/110 keyboard in the Nord (which takes some time to get used to).

And yes, the Nord does support una corda, sostenuto and string resonance, the pedal board noise, and even triple sensor detection is included. Depending on the size you select from the piano library it adds extra samples to the sound. What I did was adding the XL versions for my favorite pianos and the L and M versions for the pianos that I don't use that much. Also compression is optional, on a nord you have 2 compression methods, one is dynamic compression in the piano model itself which uses midi velocity compression and a lot of the presets have these enabled by default. The second method is a real compressor that you can add on the audio signal. But if you don't want compression it takes 2 button presses to set them both to off.

The Komplete S88 MK3 has a little bit more cheap feeling, but the main benefit is that you can load any Piano VST library and the large screen on the MK3 will show a color image of the selected piano and gives you access to program it directly from that screen through the buttons and knobs. My favorite libraries are: pianoteq 9, Native Instruments Noire and VI Labs Modern D

Now when you talk about similarities between the nord and pianoteq, there are a lot soundwise. It's important to know which piano on the nord is sampled from which model, so here is a (not official) list:
- Soft grand -> Yamaha G2
- Silver Grand -> Shigeru Kawai SK-7
- Royal Grand 3D -> Yamaha S6
- Grand Imperial -> Bösendorfer Imperial
- Amber upright -> Grotrian G132
- Velvet Grand -> Blüthner Model 1
- White Grand -> Steinway B-211
- Studio Grand 2 -> Yamaha C7

To create a similar type of sound, you have to do some technical stuff, I capture an EQ image of the Nord Model of my choice. Then apply it to a similar model of pianoteq, I can see the differences between the two models soundwise and apply that EQ model in the Master EQ and Insert EQ's of the sound I want to achieve in pianoteq. You can get really close with that method, the last step can only be done in the pro version and you have to modify the pianoteq model behavior (mostly resonance) per note to mimic the nord samples. And then you have something that has the same feeling in pianoteq as the nord.

Now why do I want to do that, well Pianoteq is much better in modeling then anything out there, so I can change whatever I want if I got a similar experience as on my nord. I didn't totally succeed at that, but now with the added sine feature in syngular I think I can get close, and I have created impulse responses from the nord reverbs so I can apply those directly in pianoteq itself. And as a sound designer I love to create my own soundpallets, so for me this is important.

Is it important for others? I don't think so. Just play the library that inspires you, and people shouldn't care what others say or think on forums.