TJ Cornish
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Posts posted by TJ Cornish
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There is a lot to like about the Fantom platform. There are a few quirks, but on the whole they have done a good job of making it a good balance of power and accessibility.
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Just now, AnotherScott said:
That said, a board that meets every listed requirement probably doesn't exist, so it will come down to prioritizing.
Based on what people seem to want around here, the perfect board probably CAN’T exist.
People have demanded infinite polyphony, infinite effects, 88 keys, 76 keys, 73 keys, “great keyboard action”/fully-weighted/synth, long throw, short throw, waterfall, internal power supply, external power supply; everything is too expensive, every manufacturer is stupid, and every keyboard is too heavy, until it “starts feeling plastic-y”. lol. We are a hard to please bunch.
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2 hours ago, jazzpiano88 said:
It's a really weird rant. Apparently people in his family can't tell when his son's guitar string goes out of tune so he's projecting it onto everyone in the public.
To me, everyone knows. We're polite. We just accept that, especially when little children are playing an out of tune violin or guitar at their concert. And then there are obvious period pitch errors like this where everyone knows the tuning problem, but doesn't call the Attorney General's office in Fulton County Georgia to try and get someone prosecuted and jailed:
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.
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6 hours ago, Johnny V. Lee said:
Great question. I'm generally covering rock, but it could be anything from 60s to 2000s. I'm not too worried about the pianos and EPs, or even the organs. Even though I am not familiar with the different models of EPs, I know the K2700 already has great sounding patches for those things.
I guess it's more about the synth and yeah I absolutely plan to learn the ropes. But let me try to think of an example to illustrate. On Styx's "Too Much Time on My Hands" there's a keyboard sound that comes in during the intro, right when the A chord hits on guitar. It sounds like a fairly basic synth sound, but it sounds like there's a phase shifter effect on it. Or something.
On my guitar rig (currently using Helix and Variax for cover songs), I pretty much know how to find a sound that's pretty close and then tweak.
On keyboard I intend to go through all the available patches and familiarize myself, but if I found something close I would not know the next step to tweaking it. Part of that is familiarizing myself with how the K2700 works, obviously, and I've read and watched some videos. But of course, the target audience of that type of thing is usually someone that's already familiar with the concepts, not a n00b.
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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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6 hours ago, ProfD said:
This thread is indicative that most gigging musicians either do not need a dedicated synth in their live rig or synth sounds can be covered with a ROMpler/workstation or a digital piano.😎
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.
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3 hours ago, David Emm said:
More than once, I've scratched my head over clumsy choices made by music tech companies.
I can see why someone would go ARGH! over the missing 9th slider, even in a synth where the organ is just part of a "band." You can't help but wish an instrument had Everything when so many seem to get there. Most of us have suffered the pangs of Why'd They Do (or NOT do) THAT?? Fortunately, I have it good enough to worry about that instead of dodging bullets in some place that's having major issues. 🤨
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.
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5 hours ago, J.F.N. said:
Both implementations mentioned sounds like "design crew having no clue about target group", that's alarming!
Not sure organ players were much of the target group of the Motif; you have more of a point on the Fantom side.
7 hours ago, AnotherScott said:Since the Montage M supports more than 8 elements per part, maybe you could move the ninth drawbar element form the second part into the first part. I'm not sure how slider assignment works on the M (since there can now be more elements than there are sliders), but maybe it gives you the ability to assign two elements to one slider? If not maybe you could use the superknob to achieve an acceptable compromise.
That is likely possible, and I think there are some sampled organs from EasySounds that may even work that way out of the box.
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1 hour ago, AnotherScott said:
On the MODX (so I assume similar on the Montage), with the "all 9 bars" performance, you get individual slider control of all 9 bars, there are no 2-drawbar-combined sliders. (There are also sliders for other things, e.g. key click and leakage). You only have the 4 MODX (or 8 Montage) sliders, but you can toggle them (or select the appropriate part) to control the different elements.
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.
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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.
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17 hours ago, BluMunk said:
I'm plugged into the DXR's line level input, and that level can't get any quieter... it's sitting somewhere between -infinity and -20.
Sounds like a mixer is the answer? I was hoping folks with deeper audio experience might have some simple-but-not-obvious-to-the-lay-person alternative
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).
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2 hours ago, DeltaJockey said:
Whether it's something that the buyer may later benefit from or not, I think it's generally considered socially distasteful to lockout an existing product or service in the possession of the purchaser until a fee is paid.
There are subtle variances on this business model that are less related to a form of extortion. More specifically, acquiring expansion hardware, or paying for access to software that resides somewhere else is one thing, but paying for permission to use something you've essentially purchased and have in your possession, ie usb audio DACS, is to me, a fine line crossed.
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.
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9 minutes ago, Keyboardplayer said:
There are apparently bugs in the Montage M that need to be addressed. Not the least of which is a polyphony note drop out issue. Yamaha touts the Montage M's "400" note polyphony, but the fact is the AWM2 engine, FM-x engine, User performance Section, & AN-x engine each have their own polyphony. So it's divided using separate chips with 128 notes each. And of course, 16 note polyphony for the AN-x engine. So, for instance, if your performance only uses AWM2 voices (patches, parts) you'll only have access to a maximum of 128 note polyphony. Same with the FM-x engine and the User section. The ONLY way to access more than 128 notes of polyphony is to use other voices (patches, parts) from other engines (and/or User section polyphony), simultaneously. My Yamaha Genos has "256" note polyphony, but it too is divided on separate chips, i.e., 128 notes for Preset/Legacy and 128 notes for the Expansion section. And I didn't discover that until after I purchased the Genos. We all hear 400 notes of polyphony, and we say, gee, I'll never have another issue with note drop out ever again if I just get the Yamaha Montage M? Oops! Not so fast. It pays to read the fine print. In the case with my Genos I was one of the first ones in the country to get one and at the time Yamaha kind of hid that fact until users pressed Yammie employees to fess up. Which they did finally but left Genos owners seething in many cases. I imagine there are a good deal of Montage M owners that still don't realize 400 doesn't necessarily mean 400 unless you access other sound engines and/or the User section polyphony all at once at the same time. The first keyboard manufacturer to release a keyboard with 400/512 notes of polyphony on ONE CHIP so you have access to all the polyphony no matter what sound engine(s) you're using will become an instant success and a huge market grabber from the competition, in my opinion. It shouldn't be that difficult. A keyboard is basically a computer with keys. Computer technology has advanced significantly in just the last 5 years. Why is the music gear industry always 10 or more years behind the computer industry? In my opinion, it's because they want to milk older technology for all it's worth. And then use marketing 'gimmicks' to try and hoodwink consumers?? You decide.
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.
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3 minutes ago, AnotherScott said:
though they appear in different colors (blue vs. green), and you can filter to see just the legos, so in that respect, they do facilitate continuing to work as you're used to.
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.
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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.
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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.
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39 minutes ago, Aynsley Green said:
It does look fantastic, but how do you fare with the weight/bulk?
Even the M6 is a bit heavy for flying around, it's nearly a dealbreaker.
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.
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1 hour ago, David Emm said:
I'm like that! TJ Cornish succinctly made the flip side of my earlier point about the right synth(s) for your personal mindset. He's the kind of player who truly meshes with a big honker like the Montage and thus gets the most from it. Its no small venture, as Our Kind knows. I admire his tenacity and even envy it a bit. Some of us are more tech-adept; others lean towards the "creative" (*cough*) abstract side of things.
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.
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12 minutes ago, DeltaJockey said:
Agree, they have improved.
Having owned an original Montage8 and then upgrading to the M8x, I'm not convinced it is VASTLY superior. I suppose it depends on what aspects you are talking about, but so far I rate the original Montage overall to be at least 75% relative to the M.
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.
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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.
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On 2/22/2024 at 6:26 PM, jazzpiano88 said:
Hardest working man in R&R Keyboard Work. NRBQ's Terry Adams. He motions to the piano and it reacts.
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.
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My Roomba doesn’t sound like that.
Anyone heard of a new model Roland Fantom being released?
in The Keyboard Corner
Posted
I’m really sorry that I agree with you. The Nautilus is a disappointing “flagship” compared to what the Kronos and OASYS were.