TJ Cornish

You’re talking about his video, which is probably the objective. On the other hand, I think a large fraction of people probably aren’t that sensitive to pitch/timing/tone, etc. “Visually relatable” qualities a musician may have can go a long way in covering over lacks in other areas.

Welcome to the forum. The K2700 is a wonderful keyboard with incredible power and nuance. Unfortunately, that complexity and Kurzweil's unique structure makes it a very difficult synth to start on to learn synthesis. To get started, grab a virtual analog soft synth of some kind that is simple in structure to learn on and drive it via MIDI from your K2700. MainStage/Logic has a couple; there are others. YouTube is a wonderful place to start; there are books on synthesis as well, and most of them will start you out with general subtractive synthesis concepts that will be easier to visualize in a simpler system. The K2700 has all of those buttons too; they are just nestled in a spider’s web of menus and layers. Once you have a feel for synthesis, you can learn VAST (the Kurzweil synth structure).

I still have my XP-80 - it’s in the basement for my kids to play on. I will have to take a look for the red goo - as far as I’m aware mine is completely fine including a working floppy drive. It was the first board I really understood, and I happily upgraded to the original Roland Fantom - until I tried the board and found it worse than the XP-80 in several material UI ways and sold it. I looked at the XP-30 and there were some attractive things, but the 61 keys was a dealbreaker, and by that time had moved on to a Kurzweil. I have kept the XP-80 out of sentimentality, but I don’t miss my other boards of that era - Yamaha EX5 (this has a cult following but the thing was so unbelievably underpowered it was pretty useless for anything other than one sound at a time), Alexis QS series, original Korg Triton. We are spoiled today - virtually unlimited memory and CPU power means anything for sale today sounds good and has enough power to at least be reasonably useful.

I played the OASYS for 9 years as my only board. I have a lot of miles on that piano sound. I moved to the German Grand in the Kronos when I moved on from the OASYS (it died), and now the CFX piano in the Montage M. I find it interesting that the Montage M has the felt piano, which to me sounds like mud, but apparently it’s the latest rage - I argue about this with a young friend of mine who thinks pianos that have sound above 3KHz are too bright. Not sure I want to go back to the OASYS piano which has a lot of attack and not much in the middle, but I am not a fan of mush either.

The OASYS piano is definitely in the Kronos, and I just got the email from Korg announcing that the OASYS piano is now available for Korg Module. Lots of opportunities to play it if you want your 2005 piano nostalgia.

99% of gigs’ sound quality is dominated by 1. musicianship of the band, 2. venue acoustics and/or stage volume, 3. competence of the sound person, if present, 4. quality of loudspeakers and mics, and about 7 more things before we get down to the differences between a virtual analog synth in a ROMpler/workstation and a “real” synth. I just listened back to my church’s Easter mix on YouTube and somehow my keys got squashed in a new and creative way - not sure if it was on the board/in the house, or part of the ‘Tube’s mangling algorithms. A different synth wouldn’t have helped.

I think you are correct in that there are always a few head scratchers where there seems to be no upside for a decision - e.g., on the Montage M you can only shift a part +/- 3 octaves, which frequently is not enough to do keyboard splits; on the other hand, I think there is a large issue of “can’t please everybody” - half the group wants the kitchen sink added while the other half says it’s too complicated.

Not sure organ players were much of the target group of the Motif; you have more of a point on the Fantom side. That is likely possible, and I think there are some sampled organs from EasySounds that may even work that way out of the box.

On the Montage M, the first 8 drawbars are the 8 sliders on the first part, and they work in reverse like a tone wheel organ - pulling them down = louder. The 1’ drawbar lives in the second part, and to control it you need to switch to the second part. This fader does not work in reverse; it’s a simple up = louder. I wish this worked like was suggested above by combining the 7th and 8th drawbars on one fader and leaving the 1’ drawbar on the 8th slider as I rarely do different things on 7 and 8 from each other, but always use the 1’ drawbar separately. Yamaha has a tone wheel engine in the YC board; perhaps they will add it to the Montage in a way that makes it playable without eating all of the polyphony of the board. Maybe they could use one of the assignable knobs as the 9th drawbar.

Just visited the House On The Rock in Spring Green Wisconsin. What a...um...unique experience. Loved the antique player pianos and music boxes; the mechanized orchestras were both impressive and disappointing due to how much has fallen into disrepair and been replaced with MIDI and speakers, and the Organ Room. Such a weird mix of genuinely grand instruments and then movie-set mad scientist creations. I'm glad I went, and was equally glad to leave - I was feeling weird anxiety due to overstimulation and covered the last 20% of the exhibits very quickly to get some air.

There is a switch for the combo XLR/TRS jacks for mic/line. Is the switch set to “Line” mode? If you are using the RCA input jacks, those are designed for consumer-level inputs (think stereo equipment).

I don’t disagree, and hate the subscription model, too, which is one of the primary reasons I play self-contained keyboards rather than the soft-synth model. The solution to this is voting with our feet. I will counter my own argument that the professional instrument market is not exactly highly lucrative due to a very low number of units sold, and we can be a demanding bunch, so I understand the need to explore all revenue options, but there is a point where enough is enough. This has happened to ProTools, Waves, and a number of other products where subscription greed has turned out to drive people to other products as people don’t see enough value for the new price and get understandably concerned when something they have been using in the past suddenly gets 300% more expensive.

The polyphony structure of the M isn’t a bug; it is the architecture of the board. The M takes nothing away compared to the previous Montage; Yamaha has cleverly rearranged the same hardware - the dual DSPs - such that they now can produce 128 polyphony each, with the limitation being needing to use the other sample RAM bank. This thread goes into great detail on the steep learning curve of the M. Anyone not able to parse the very verbose description of this architecture in all the presales literature will surely have a hill to climb in using the M at a high level. This is absolutely true of the YouTuber you have linked - this person routinely posts videos showing frustration at “bugs” when they are a result of his misunderstanding of the board. As to “this shouldn’t be this hard” - well, apparently it is, or someone would have figured it out. Korg went the general purpose CPU route with the OASYS/Kronos/Nautilus, and those products have similar polyphony limitations to ASICs used by Yamaha and Roland. Would it be nice if Yamaha developed a new generation of ASIC that was 4X as powerful as the current chips? Yes; have they done the math to believe that the millions of dollars of R&D and possibly semiconductor fab updates will produce a financial return on their investment? I’m sure they have, and at the moment that answer is no. Polyphony issues are far worse on other platforms - there is a 400 page thread over at GearSpace about the Roland Fantom that claims 256 note polyphony. The amount of hand-wringing there for 150 pages is enough to give any sane person an aneurism. I’m not trying to pick on you particularly - lots of people feel similarly, but the belief that “this should be easy, why is vendor XYZ so dumb” doesn’t hold water. There are two paths: 1. Do less - limit the keyboard so it works the same at a level of lowest-common-denominator. This is how Nord works and a lot of non-flagship keyboards. 2. Release the power and complexity to users complete with caveats and try to educate. The Montage M is a product on path 2. If that isn’t your thing, there are other choices.

You can filter single part vs multi, however I’m not positive the blue vs green always works. There are reports of phantom objects and settings even in the template objects; I wonder if even Yamaha struggles keeping things straight.

The Montage M works ‘by value’ using your vernacular, but there is an additional wrinkle - there is no difference between a voice and a performance/combination in the underlying structure (as far as I can figure out anyway). You can make a “patch/tone” with one sound and save it as an object, but it’s still an 8-part (actually 16-part if you don’t need SSS or local control of the back half) thing. You can “import” these tones into another patch/tone, where they work like a “performance/combi” as other keyboards call it, but this new object is still in the same list of sounds as your original single tone. Additionally, you can import multiple multi-part “patch/tone/combi/performances” into another multi-part “patch/tone/combi/performance”, depending on how many slots you need to use. This is extremely powerful as you can (within the limits of 8 parts of 128 elements each) combine several full-featured sounds together, but it’s a little odd to not have a hierarchy like pretty much every other board uses. You can still (as I do) have a workflow of lego sounds that you can recombine as needed; the main adjustment is that both your legos and your performances all show up in the same list. The Fantom structure is significantly easier to understand - tones combine into scenes and everything is the same size. There are a few limitations of which slot certain things have to live (VPiano must be in slot 1, tonewheel organ must be in slot 2, I IIRC the new ACB models have to run in slot 1), but other than that you’re not going to get lost; the downside is the Fantom doesn’t sound as good - the additional complexity/capabiltiy of the Montage makes a difference in the musical output.

The Montage line - M or original, are not slimline instruments. The ESP software that gives you the sound engine of the Montage M on a PC could be used with a controller du jour, but some of the magic would be gone without the control surface and keyboard action. Backlining sounds like a good option.

There is no doubt it is huge. If Yamaha didn’t have smaller than normal keys on the 6 and 7 I might have gone with the 7. It’s my bottom board, so was never interested in the 6. In the Gator plastic case, the M8X is actually lighter than my XK-5 in a plywood case. Wheels and never playing gigs where stairs are a problem, and the fact that I have a full-size Ford Transit cargo van make the bulk manageable. Ironically, the thickness is the biggest issue for me - my rehearsal desk at home is not adjustable, and the extra thickness of the board means I have to sit on a pillow on my chair to get my elbows in the right place. For quick stuff the Fantom7 goes, as it’s the “good enough” all-in-one board. I’m hoping someone posts pictures or video of the inside of the M8X to see what (if anything) requires all that space. I suspect the action takes up the bulk of the bulk.

Thank you for the kind words. Every product on the market has a target audience; the Montage M has sold above expectations (it’s still constrained in Europe), so there are more than a few people who have grokked it, but it isn’t for everyone. I would say the Montage M and Nord Stage are pretty opposite products (though even the Nord is starting to get complicated in its own ways). The Montage is not an organ (though it can sort of awkwardly do it if that’s the only thing you want to do with it at a time and if you don’t need to adjust the 1’ drawbar very often). The Montage is not targeted at being a stage piano, though if all you need is a piano sound, it can certainly do that with excellent results. In my opinion, the Montage’s sweet spot is as a platform with soft-synth-like power, but with the rock solid operation of a purpose-built, mil-spec, single-vendor system. Why it works for me: - No PC required. I do IT as a day job. I don’t need that headache in my music. I have hired and fired MainStage 3 times. I want my keyboard rig to work the same way every time I power it on, and not worry about USB connection issues, glitching due to background tasks, software updates, etc. - IMO the sound quality is 6 out of 5 stars good. OMG does it sound good. Love the CFX piano, love the Rhodes. Love the ANX. Love the EasySounds Analog sample library. - The control surface is better than anything else on the planet - sliders with LED ladders, endless rotary encoder knobs with position indication, scene buttons, Super Knob, etc. The second screen can be very helpful. - I can get more sound out of the Montage simultaneously than any other means I have tried - my standard template performance has the CFX piano, a pad I made from built-in samples, a pad I made from the EasySounds Analog library, an FM pad, and another synth sound either from ANX or the EasySounds library in the user sample range. All of these run all the time, and can be morphed between with sliders, have the filter cutoff adjusted by knobs, have the parts labeled on the second screen, and I have zero polyphony trouble due to spreading this between the 4 engines (400 stereo voices). There is no other keyboard on the planet that can handle this. In one patch, I can have a large number of detailed, dynamically changing sounds that can go from whispery-background to 50’-wide mix domination. - This is part and parcel of the sound quality, but the massive amount of effects power - the ability to have two IFX channels per part plus all of the insert and master stuff is more than any other board on the planet. - Being a Yamaha, this thing is bomb-proof. - I use a different board for organ (XK-5). - It is luxurious to play. It feels great, and my fingers connect with the dynamic range of the keyboard. I believe I play better because of this instrument. This comes at the cost of a need to understand the Yamaha way. It will not bend to you; you need to bend to it.

I have not owned an original so this is second-hand information, but the extra elements per voice that make the primary piano not take up four slots (that would be a dealbreaker for me right there), the extra screen that tells you what the heck the knobs are doing, the improved UI, and the unlocked extra polyphony which I use regularly, don’t seem like small upgrades to me. I’m not a huge PAT user so that’s not a big difference maker, but I know others like it. My point was that if the M is still considered inscrutable with the Navigation screen and various UI simplifications, that doesn’t say a lot for the operability of the original.

I have had my Montage M since November and have gotten fairly deep in it. The sound quality is stunning - far above anything else I’ve owned previously, and the raw power is incredible. It is a “more is more” instrument though, and if you are not willing to put “more” effort into learning it, you won’t be able to take advantage of the “more” that it has compared to other options out there. It feels great to play, and once dialed, it is a dream. I trip on arpeggiators (can’t figure out how to create a reliable toggle where pressing a key starts the arp and then pressing a different key stops it other than a weird bug/feature where if you assign a key on the zone that’s out of the range of the playable notes it’s still running but playing notes you can’t hear), I hate the hierarchy of patterns vs. performances (I try to do simple things like click tracks with tempos, but as you can’t assign a pattern to a performance (other than a hack in Live Mode), you have to essentially create a pattern for each performance, which then becomes the parent object, and as was pointed out above, the limited number of patterns being 128 is very limiting. Griping aside, after putting “more” time in, I have worked around nearly all of my frustration, and have had some luck using the super knob to morph things as well as cool stuff with scenes. It also doesn’t have some of the functional limitations that other boards have (e.g., limited effects/polyphony/lesser sound quality of Fantom, limited effects and combi slots of Kronos, complications of Kurzweil VAST). I do think it’s interesting that this thread talks about deficiencies of the M, however the M is a VASTLY better board than the original Montage. I didn’t own a Montage (the board never made sense to me in a pre-sales world and I was happy with my Kronos), but if the M is as challenging as people seem to think, the original must have been quite the disappointment. I’m not sorry I bought it, but unfortunately I’m not hopeful that Yamaha will do much to fix the things that I and pretty much everyone else trip over. The IdeaScale website is disappointing - lots of good ideas there and very little ever seems to get implemented. In the past, Roland and Korg have done a better job reacting to user feedback via firmware updates; Yamaha seems to save some of that for new models.

Every time I watch this guy I think “That isn’t how a piano is supposed to work”, and my cuticles ache just watching him. Your description of ‘motioning to the piano and it reacts’ is apt - what an effortless ability to do seemingly random things and have amazing music come out.

My Roomba doesn’t sound like that.

Disclaimer- I’ve played a vintage mechanical B3 like twice in my life, so I can’t comment on authenticity at that level; my comments are based on what my ears hear in others’ recordings vs what I can get out of the XK5 and prior experience with other clonewheels. I’m a church guy and play worship/rock organ. Not a jazz guy. What I like about the XK5: It feels great. The extra key contacts make a huge difference compared to my former clone wheels. I love the expression pedal with kick switch for Leslie speed. I have really appreciated the custom tone wheel option - I’m going for “well-behaved” and “sits in the mix” rather than replicating every quirk of the original, and on basically all of the clonewheels I have used including the XK-5 by default, the 5 1/3 drawbar just screams on about the top 8 keys. Being able to tweak that one drawbar down on just those few keys has made a big difference. Love multiple sets of drawbars and the physical controls. I think it sounds good; everyone else tells me it sounds great. With all of our guitar folks having gone to digital rigs, I am now the only person on the team with tubes in my rig. Less favorite things about the XK5: The menu structure is, um, interesting. I have struggled with saving presets - I want to have preset keys save stuff other than drawbar settings. It is possible and I think I sort of figured it out once, but it was so painful I never tried again. I am a little bit worried about the DIN connector that the pedal uses - I’ve had my XK5 since 2018 and play weekly and it has been OK in that time, but it isn’t as robust a connector as a 1/4” jack. The good news is it should be replaceable. The orange LED that is the “virtual filament” is a little bit lame. I get why they do it and they are far from the only device that does, but it’s an affectation, and it annoys me. A general comment - there is a large fraction of users here that want everything lighter. I get it, but that comes at a cost. The XK5 is solid in a good way, and manufacturers don’t put lead in keyboards just to piss us off. If you want wood, want all the physical controls, want robustness, want an internal power supply, etc., it is what it is. There are lesser instruments that are lighter to choose from.

I did a quick Google to figure out what you are hinting at - appears to be this: https://sector101.co.uk/sr-jv-romulator.html Looks very fun!! The only SR-JV-capable board I still own is an XP-80 and it's just holding down some floor in the spare bedroom, so this is not probably a project for me, but it's great engineering and I'm glad to see people playing around!

There is a lot of style here…