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Like previous Clavia instruments, the Nord Wave is a thing of beauty.

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Right from the off, the Nord Wave looks very familiar. It feels similar to the Nord Lead, from the keyboard action and solid metal case, right through to the solid-feeling dials, stone effect mod wheel and the wooden pitch lever.

Unfortunately, one of the best features of the Nord Lead 3 is gone - the LED rings round the dials showing where your settings were left. Maybe this has been done to try and keep costs down, but it was a really useful feature.

The front panel is also quite cluttered and squashed up compared to the NL3's, and many will find the Wave's interface to be a backward step.

Several features on the Wave have been taken directly from the Nord Stage. First off, it uses the same bright LCD display. Secondly, A and B panel slots have been added to deal with layers.

The Wave is duo-timbral and can have two patches simultaneously available (via its keyboard or external MIDI control) though unfortunately you can't adjust splits/ranges and have a bass up to middle C on slot A and a pad on slot B (although we hope this will be changed via an OS update in the future). You can only layer the full ranges on top of each other.

The keyboard itself has velocity and aftertouch, and is very playable with a positive, controllable action.

Selecting from the 1,024 patches is simple enough, but why Clavia has done away with the direct Patch/Page/Bank selection buttons from the Lead/Stage we're not sure.

Guided tour

On the top left of the front panel are the standard mono/legato and glide modes. Next up is the 'vibrato section' where you can select from three settings to delay the onset of the vibrato, assign it to aftertouch and assign pitch mod to the mod wheel.

There are also two LFOs. LFO 1 has six destinations including stereo panning and Osc modulation; LFO 2 has five without the pan option. There's also a single shot waveform available on LFO 2.

It's great that the Morph section has been brought over from the Stage series as well. This enables up to 20 destinations to be modulated at one time using the mod wheel/ control pedal, keyboard note number or note velocity. Hit the respective Morph button and turn the dial you want it assigned to - it's that easy!

The Mod envelope (also seen on the Nord Lead 3) gives an extra level of time-evolving modulation within a sound. It's essentially a simplified, assignable third A/R envelope with six possible destinations.

The Oscillator section is very similar to that on Nord Leads of old, but with much more flexibility. This is where most of the innovations have been implemented in the Wave.

There are the standard pulse, sawtooth, triangle and noise waves, which all sound authentically analogue ('noise' is currently stored under the 'misc' option). However, where the Wave really differs is with its oscillator options.