TJ Cornish

Are you guys talking actual line arrays as provided by professional sound companies costing $100K+ or are you talking about "line arrays" e.g. Bose stick things, anything with 2 boxes on top of each other on a pole, or anything sold at Guitar Center? An actual line array only works like a line source if it is long enough to have pattern control down to some reasonable frequency. Anything shorter than 6' tall (meaning actually 6' worth of boxes) is a "dash" array, and doesn't have all of the acoustic advantages of the real deal. There can be some advantages if designed well - one of the pictures here is a JBL VRX constant curvature system, and if designed and deployed correctly, can provide good coverage and sound, however the rush of the last 20 years for everybody to own a "line array" has created a lot of wannabe products that are arguably worse than a decent point source box, especially if we are talking gigs of 100 - 200 people. Line arrays work on the principle of destructive interference - level consistency over distance works when the array is shaped like a "J" where more boxes at the top of the array firing on the back of the room equal out with fewer boxes covering the center and front of the room. In theory this means you can have even SPL at any distance; in practice this only works down to whatever frequency your array is long enough to have pattern control over. If your array is too short, you get all of the negatives of interfering drivers with none of the advantages of any pattern consistency. I owned and ran a small JBL Vertec line array system for a decade and it was a good run and gun system as I had to cover a different shaped room every gig, but when my church needed new PA speakers and we had the luxury of choosing the right speaker for the room out of a catalog, we picked a great point source box (EAW QX500 series) that sounds WAY better than the average line array would. Answering the question more directly - if you're playing through a "real" line array at a big show, it is likely a lot more of the nuance of your instrument can be reproduced and heard because the gear and the operators are higher class than the typical small venue where stage volume and low $$ equipment lack the ability to accurately reproduce your instrument. This may mean you don't have to go with your favorite 'ice pick grand' to cut through the mix; you can actually pick something musical. One trick I do irrespective of speaker style is to record a couple minutes of noodling to the internal sequencer (if equipped on your board), and then I'll hit play and go out and listen to how the speakers are producing my tone. I may roll off some low mids, pick a different patch, make a mental note that I may need to keep the piano more forward and not overly wash it with pads, etc. By doing this I'm auditioning not just the speakers but the venue as well. The good news is that the room is going to sound its worst empty; when the punters arrive they soak up some of the room reflections and life improves to a degree. If you have a rich uncle and are looking for an amazing box, the Meyer X40 is about the best sounding portable point source box on the market and will outrun any of the prosumer line arrays in terms of fidelity. Unfortunately the cost per box is in the range of a high-end keyboard workstation.

Fairlight CMI

I’m a month in on my M8, coming from a fairly technical background and with fairly high expectations of tweaking. If you want to stick 2 or 3 preset sounds into a split/layer in a performance, this is pretty easy operationally, and it works seamlessly as long as you are trying to smash together sounds that total 8 parts or less. The advantage of a Nord or of the Roland Fantom series is that presets are packaged up and are all the same size, and therefore the behavior when working with these objects is always the same. There are limitations here too - on the Nord you can’t overwrite the Organ section with another synth patch, and on the Fantom you have to keep the special models on the channels that they support, but as long as you know which place to put the thing, it’s going to be predictable. The major issue on the M series is that, while they have made a lot of progress compared to the original Montage, Yamaha has not been able to completely hide the dizzying power and complexity of the synth from some tasks that in other boards do not require deep diving. Generally speaking I have had success in finding what I wanted to in creating new sounds - both ANX and AWM2. It’s an extremely powerful synth platform and I am in love with two effects processors per part. Occasionally I have to guess in a couple of places where the setting I want lives - as the video points out it could be a performance-common, a part-common, or a part-element/osc. I’m getting better at that as time goes on. The areas that I still find challenging relate to the control structure - the interplay of Control Assign, the super knob, motion sequences, patterns, and the arpeggiator. I have explored most of these areas and have eventually gotten what I have wanted every time, but goodness, has this been a ride. I think David and MacSaint are both correct - if you are a user with relatively simple needs that amount to assembling existing sound content and can learn a few tricks, it isn’t out of reach. If you are maybe a mid-level tweaker, the M can be daunting. If you are an advanced knob turner or if you are willing to sit down and work through the complexity, I have found this keyboard to have unlocked a lot of ideas that I previously couldn’t have done with other boards. The sounds are fantastic, the keyboard feels very nice and responsive (this is an opinion change for me from my first exposure - as I have used it it has grown on me), and I have been able to do things that I have always wanted to do on other boards but lacked the tools and/or I never figured it out until now.

TLDR - It’s the most expensive keyboard, so obviously it’s the best.

I’m not necessarily agreeing with Aynsley that Omnisphere and Keyscape only work in the studio, however the link you have shared here is pretty much the definition of a studio piece. No in person audience, no live PA, no fighting subwoofers and crappy room acoustics. This is a multi-tracked studio recording with probably more than a little post-production.

3 years. I’ll buy an M7 to go with my current M8 if they stop using the silly small keys…

I played pretty much exclusively Korg from 2005 (OASYS) until 2021 (a couple Kronoses). Korg hasn’t been the same since they let JerryTheK go.

I gave in and took delivery of my M8x today. I DO NOT like the physical thickness of the board - right now I’m sitting on a pillow on my chair to get to a reasonable height with the keyboard on my music desk surface. Long term I’m going to have to do something about that. I’m still getting up to speed on the workflow - there is a lot to know and sort out with many layers of settings - element, part, common, the various assignable controls, etc, so there is a lot of work ahead there as well, but THE SOUND!!! This sounds really fantastic. I think the Fantom gives a little quicker instant gratification as it’s a simpler architecture, but I always felt like the sounds were a bit of a compromise - VPiano, strings, Rhodes/Wurlys, etc. The Fantom does a lot in a small package (I have the Fantom 7), and the tone wheel organ is a lot better designed than the partial-based one in the Montage M, but I think that with time investment, the M8x will pay dividends in sound quality. I haven’t yet tried recreating the pain points on that I found on the Fantom (timing issues with LFOs not being synced to MIDIClock, glitches with fader catch mode where suddenly they just decide to go to jump mode, no seamless patch switching with VPiano, etc.). But I suspect I won’t find these problems in the Montage. Perhaps there will be new ones that bug me that the Fantom didn’t have - TBD. I am exploring ways to maximize polyphony. I really like the CFX piano. I have been going back and forth on if I want to get a piano sample to push that function into the user bank processor, or if I get an analog samples library and use the CFX piano. I may do both. I don’t think this is a good board for someone who doesn’t have at least a little desire to get their hands dirty, but it sure feels like the potential is there.

I have spent the last few weeks ruminating on the Montage M. I experimented with creating a click pattern and assigning it to part 9-16, but that causes seamless switching to not be available, which is a deal breaker for me. While browsing the full manual, I caught something that I verified works in the store - you can set the pattern time signature to 1/4 which eliminates the measure accent on the metronome (or more probably makes every beat an accent beat, but that’s still good enough with the choices of click tone they provide). This allows the metronome to work the way I want it without requiring dedicating a part to it with a custom pattern. It’s a little bit of an odd way to solve the problem, but gets me 95% of the way there.

I’m still on the fence about a Montage M. My main rig is a Roland Fantom 7 with Hammond XK-5, and I quite like the Fantom 7 keyboard - it’s stiff enough to not give me accuracy problems but light and soft enough that I don’t bleed if I do a bit of organ sliding. I don’t love the size or weight of the M8x keyboard and thought hard about the Montage M7, but Yamaha’s oddly smaller keys I just know will bug me, so if I get a Montage, it will be the big dog, and not for the poly aftertouch that everyone else seems to be drooling over.

There is some vampire current in a soft power button compared to a mechanically actuated hard power switch, but 100mW is better than 30W or whatever the Montage draws when fully on. An interesting thing on the Fantom - it has a mechanical push button that detents on and pops out for off, but there is some magic that happens on that board as well - it takes about a second after you push the button for the keyboard to shut down. Roland has advised using the keyboard’s button for power instead of using an external switch as apparently there is some amount of graceful shutdown that is done when you use the Fantom’s button which doesn’t happen if you cut power externally.

I’m grateful it at least can still be turned off. I’m not looking forward to a world where we have to work out something like this:

I found time to stop by again and looked into Assign mode. Yes - you can set custom names for the Assign knobs; what I struggled with is that they seem to operate in relative mode rather than absolute mode. On the Fantom I like dual assigning part volume to both the sliders and knobs. Sliders are great for fast changes, but they lose reference to the logical value if they are in a different physical place when you change scenes. The knobs are nice for small changes where I don’t have to worry about “catching” the value with the fader, which often causes a jump in part volume. On the Montage, I can assign a knob to “Volume”, but it works as a relative offset rather than affecting the actual part volume. I looked to see if I could find an absolute mode, but did not find one. There is a part volume page for the knobs that is pre-assigned, however the text is fixed at “Part 1”, “Part 2”, etc. I was able to work out the metronome as a pattern on part 16 to my liking with just simple beats. It works fine via the transport controls, but I verified part start/stop can’t be assigned to an assignable button on the left side. As I continue to spend time with it I feel like we could come to a functional understanding, and if I didn’t already have two great workstations I would likely get one. The question for me is whether it is really materially better than the Fantom for my purposes. The Fantom is more of an immediate keyboard. The Yamaha seems like it can do more stuff than the Fantom, but the price for that is a lot more setting up things. I had a gander through the original Montage firmware update list to see what they added over the life of that instrument. I may be underestimating the improvements, but they didn’t seem that earth shattering - at least compared to all of the huge adds of the Fantom. You can take that two ways I suppose - Yamaha may be the more considered player that delivered a nearly complete product initially and added only small tweaks while Roland released a half-baked product and only recently built it up to what it should have been, or you could judge that Yamaha is unresponsive to their customers and you are likely to get stuck with the way it is. My gut feel is the future of the Montage M firmware is a few small changes, and major adds/updates are unlikely, so if I do go forward, it will be on the basis of what it can do today, not pie in the sky hopes for improvements. For what it is worth, I bought my Fantom in the fall of 2021 after initially rejecting it as not doing what I needed. When they added the organ mode and a few other changes, then it became interesting.

I obviously understand the Fantom’s slot limitations for VPiano and tonewheel on zones 1 and 2 respectively; that happens to work for me (with a minor move from my Kronos workflow where I put the organ on 8). With the Yamaha, I would have to always put the organ on zone 1, or more likely, in the rare event I needed it, would have to have a different layout of zones than my usual template. First world problems, I know, but I believe you and I agree that in many cases, the control and usability architecture equals or even exceeds sound quality, so it matters to me. I want to get over there again and take another crack at the smaller screen. If I can put user labels on the assign page, that might be good enough.

I had another chunk of time on the Montage M at Guitar Center a couple days ago and wanted to share a few more thoughts. For background, I have 25+ years of flagship workstation experience, currently playing a Fantom 7 and Kronos 2. My last Yamaha was an EX5, so I’m out of date there, though I have a fair bit of experience with Yamaha mixers, so I do get some of the Yamaha design ethos. For some reason GC had the stand set at a really awkward level - way too high for sitting (T-Rex mode), but pretty low for standing. In spite of this, I did find myself liking the action for things other than organ (which isn’t a strength of this board anyway), and the rest of the build quality is first class, which does not surprise me from Yamaha. I’m 99% sure the bottom of the keyboard is MDF rather than metal, which seems to be how many 88’s are built. From a $ per cubic inch perspective, the M8x is one of the best values on the market, as it is HUGE in all dimensions - thick, wide, deep, and heavy. My music desk at home has a double-layered top (non-adjustable) and I’m concerned that a keyboard as thick as the M8x would put me in my own T-Rex mode at home with the keys too high. I have previously written about how I think the Fantom architecture is really well done from the standpoint of giving people what they expect when they build a performance - 16 fully-allocated slots where any sound added into a scene will sound and work as expected - no effects pool that runs out after a couple parts. My ideal workflow is to have the same types of sounds in each zone from scene to scene so when I play, I don’t have to remember where I stuck the XYZ part. On the Fantom this works out as: 1. VPiano 2. Tone wheel organ 3. Pad 1 4. Pad 2 5. Some kind of energy booster - polysynth, strings 6. Spare 7. Lead 8. Pulse/bouncy/bells/whatever The Fantom works very well for this workflow, as I can just turn off zones I don’t need but have them present and ready to go if I want them. As I play with varying sizes of teams, a song on a given day may or may not have someone else covering a part, so being able to build from this template gives me the ability to upsize or downsize my sonic footprint. The Fantom has a couple glitches with this - no seamless switching on VPiano even if I’m going from scenes with exactly the same VPiano patch, but on the whole it works very well - far better than the Kronos due to not having enough IFX to leave this many things assigned. With the dedicated VPiano engine that doesn’t steal polyphony from the rest of the instrument, I have virtually no trouble with polyphony, even when using 5 or 6 zones at a time. I took the above mindset into looking at the Montage M to see if I could get this to work. I was very excited about the small parameter screen above the zone controls and was hopeful this would be really useful live. The good news: In spite of the stupid stand height at GC, after sitting on my leg (I could probably have asked them to lower the stand, but hey - I’m from Minnesota - we don’t complain), I did really like the M8x action for piano/general stuff. If I buy one, it will probably be the 8. Yamaha has their own version of “fully allocated parts”, so for the most part, I can setup my categories as above, but there are limitations - the Leslie effect is only available on zone 1. FM-X - this is very cool and powerful, and does not use AWM2 polyphony. Essentially a second keyboard’s worth of additional polyphony if you use user samples, and there are very high quality and reasonably priced 3rd party libraries that take advantage of this. Virtual analog - a very nice bonus! 2 insert effects per zone compared to the Fantom’s 1 per zone I did not do a lot of detailed listening (forgot to bring headphones), but I do think the Montage sounds better than the Fantom in many categories due to a more complex architecture. They did implement a sort-of usable Tonewheel organ that can work if it’s the only sound you are trying to play. Basic linear sequencer. The Fantom gets rightly dinged for not having a sequencer that can hold enough notes for a whole song. You don’t get a lot of editing ability on the Montage, but since most folks sequence on the computer and then dump into the board, it’s probably good enough. The bad news: This is NOT an organ board. Their “9-bars” organ patch is implemented in partials, so it takes 9 voices of polyphony per note. There is enough poly to cover 10 fingers’ worth of organ, but not enough for any layering, and might even be marginal if you cheat with the sustain pedal, as I do. The sliders flip like on the Fantoms, but as you only have 8 of them, and as I tend to do a lot with the 9th bar, this is a significant annoyance. I’m told you can get to the 9th bar by switching to another bank, but I tried and failed to find it. Maybe there’s a way to use one of the assignable knobs for this. Lastly, the rotary effect can only be assigned to zone 1, which messes up my zone category system I described above. The split AWM2 polyphony is weird. I get architecturally why they had to do it and I’m glad it’s there, but to use it I would have to buy something like EasySounds AnalogExperience to put some samples in the user bank. In practice this probably isn’t a big deal for how I work, but it would be nice if there was a way to copy baked in samples over to the user bank so I could do this with internal sounds. The Fantom has a very simple metronome function that I can assign to a button to use as a click track for the band. It always works, is in simple beats (no measure accent), and I can control it from the left side of the keyboard. The Montage has a metronome function, but it has measure accents so I have to care about time signatures rather than simple beats, and so far I haven’t found a way to assign start/stop to a button on the left side of the board - I have to use the transport buttons in the middle. I can get around this I believe by recording a pattern and assigning it to one of the 9-16 parts (this is essentially how I do this on the Kronos), but it’s not as simple as the Fantom. Physical size - the M8x is the size of the Ark; even the M7 is big. I don’t care so much about the weight, but the bulk of the M8x is daunting. Keyboard can only control zones 1-8 without doing a dumb MIDI loop. I don’t really need more than 8 zones (other than the click track) so this isn’t really a big quality of life limitation, but it’s dumb. No sampling at all, even though there are analog inputs. I do use this occasionally; The Fantom’s sampling engine is basic but has worked for me. This could very well be my lack of familiarity with the board, but I didn’t see how to use the small screen to label what the assignable controllers do - I would love to be able to sneak in a part name to see what the zones are doing without having to look at the main screen. Not a big deal, but lessens the utility of the small screen compared to what I was hoping for. I’m trying to not conflate my lack of familiarity of the Yamaha workflow with objective truth, but I think it’s hard to make the argument that the Yamaha workflow isn’t more confusing than it needed to be. I’m still on the fence here - I’m excited to get the Fantom EX update which will hopefully scratch some itches, but there is enough of interest in the Montage that maybe one will follow me home at some point.

I agree that this is a good update from Roland, and it’s priced very reasonably, especially since they have announced that people who purchased NZyme previously will get a discount on the new EX model (via an email offer to NZyme owners). I’m excited for the new German grand. Others have commented on disappointment on not fixing some “quality of life” things on the board and I sure hope they keep working on some things (lack of seamless switching of VPiano, LFO sync problems, lack of linear sequencer, etc.), but Roland deserves credit for a lot of work for this upgrade. I spent another 45 minutes on the Montage M at Guitar Center a couple days ago trying to get my head around it vs. the Fantom. There is no doubt that it can do things the Fantom can’t, but it is significantly harder to use than the Fantom. Evaluating the action was awkward as for some odd reason GC had the stand set so it was 6” too high to play at a sitting level, but too low to stand at. I’ll put a longer version of my thoughts in the Montage M thread, but I did find it interesting that with all of the hand wringing about the Fantom’s “polyphony problems” (not an issue in my experience), the Montage M has this too if you try to add any parts to an organ performance - the way the “9-bars” organ is built is such that every key takes 9 notes of polyphony, so you can play only 14 notes before stealing happens just with the organ engine - adding even a second layer of AWM2 cuts that down to an unusable number.

Did it correspond with the timing of your auto-shutoff settings? Sometimes switches are also circuit breakers. If this didn’t fit with auto-shutoff settings, that would indicate either something wrong with the power supply that is causing the switch/breaker to trip, or something wrong with the switch itself.

I had a Roland XV-5080 20 years ago. It was a 32-part multitimbral synth, but it had a whopping 3 insert effects; the other 29 parts sounded materially worse in performance mode than in program mode. The Kronos has 12 IFX, but as you mention, many factory programs don’t use just one, so you tend to run out with about 3 or 4 programs in a combi sounding correct (and there was the odd choice of sticking a compressor for the drum track on every program that took up a slot and was almost never actually used and had to be edited away). For my purposes, the pool model “worked” only to the extent that there were enough resources in the pool to draw from. Kurzweil never had enough, and the Kronos barely had enough. Everything in life is a trade off; for my live work I have practically had more trouble with effects limitations than polyphony limitations.

By fully-allocated I mean you can put any 8 (or 16) tones into a performance and they sound the same as when they were alone, as opposed to the Kronos and Kurzweil architectures where there are a certain number of shared effects units so that even if you have polyphony left in a performance with several parts, you may be out of effects processors. The Roland has the primary insert effect per part, but there are a number of these effects that are actually a couple combined things as a chain, which reduces some of the need for more. My main area of felt pain here goes back to the fact that the main tone LFOs don’t track with the MIDIClock - they are set to a value that is “close-ish”, but drift over time. The only LFO that truly syncs is the effect LFO, so if that’s important to you, you lose your ability to have a part effect there. Bummer on the software only being a tone librarian - I agree with you, I need to arrange my scenes more than my tones.

I’m glad to find a kindred spirit in someone who agrees that things other than sonic purity also matter. My Fantom is a 7, so I’ve been on a synth action for a while. My Kronos is the 88 key. I tried the Fantom 8 and immediately passed due to the fact that every key required a sledgehammer’s force; conversely I loved the Fantom 7 action. The M8x action is lighter than the Fantom 8, and that may be where some of the reviewers are coming from who say it’s “light”, but those who say the action works for organ don’t play a lot of organ. I played organ on the Kronos 88 for many years; it sort of works - better than the Montage M anyway, but after I got an XK-5, I have never looked back. I want to give the Montage another look in 6 months. I will hopefully be in a better place and maybe some things will be sorted out with sample libraries updated for the M (I know the original Montage samples do work but aren’t optimized for the new stuff), and maybe an OS update or two. It’s clearly a worthy board, but not quite enough to dethrone the Fantom for what I care about.

I use the Fantom as my main board. I play in the church world, so my typical setup is piano, 2 different pads, and usually 1-2 key splits for special things. I use VPiano for piano which has dedicated polyphony. I have NEVER had trouble with polyphony on the Fantom with Zencore sounds. I did have trouble on the Kronos occasionally. Can you load up a giant performance with hoggy patches and get into trouble? Yes, but use a little brain power and you are fine. Roland does what everyone does - put a ton of work into ear candy stuff that takes a ton of polyphony and is appropriate for solo stuff, but isn’t essential in a mix and can usually be culled back to something reasonable. I spent some time with the Montage M today - there are some things that the Montage can do that the Fantom can’t, however I think the Fantom architecture is really great for most players - the effects are fully allocated, and for the most part you can just line up the sounds you want in zones and go. Will Roland replace it soon? I’m guessing no. Will I use ACB? Probably not, as I already avoid the Jupiter/Juno stuff for polyphony reasons, and it just doesn’t matter in a mix for what I do. I am hoping they extend the length of the sequencer and that they fix some timing issues - especially the LFO which doesn’t sync to the main keyboard time. One longstanding complaint has recently been addressed - a guy from Italy just released an editor/librarian. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but plan to ASAP.

"With each version release, we noticed increased positive feedback from our customers. Our product has steadily evolved along with this input." i lol’d at this - that’s quite the positive spin for “we originally released a half-finished keyboard and took three more years to finish the other half”.

This is timed to try to keep a few Fantom owners from jumping over to the new Montage M - I think the article first appeared on the day the M was announced. I am grateful for any new development on the platform; I remain hopeful they will address some other limitations of the board other than ACB. Based on the nZyme expansion, they will probably try to charge $150 for the new functionality. I’m happy to pay for that if it does useful things - development isn’t free, and $150 is a lot less money than a new board.

Thank you for this additional detail. I had a few minutes to run to a store earlier today. As I mentioned above, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a Yamaha board, so here are my thoughts coming from Fantom/Kronos: Physical size - good grief this is huge. I expect the complaints of 60lbs are as much about the huge size that weight is distributed over as much as the weight itself. It is thick! The M8x action is slower than I expected. It’s not bad and I think I could get used to it, but I would have thought it would retrigger a bit faster. I did like PAT - I could see that being useful. I have no doubt the board sounds great - I was evaluating it less from a sounds perspective as from a control and operational perspective. There are a LOT of modes for the sliders/knobs, and I didn’t fully get the hang of them in the 20 or so minutes I could spare to play it. Physical controls were very nice - the board feels extremely solid. I struggled with tone wheel organ patches - I understand this isn’t a focus of this board, but all of the factory ones were laid out oddly. I spent the vast majority of my time playing with the metronome. Starting and stopping the metronome via the transport control buttons works even with an empty pattern which is good, however I couldn’t find a way to turn off the downbeat accent, meaning I have to care about measures and time signatures rather than just beats. I saw the time signature field, but it was grayed out and I never did figure out how to change it from 4/4. For my usage, this probably isn’t good enough, so I would have to pursue the manual pattern option in performance slot 9 thing. I don’t think this is a deal breaker - it’s closer to how I had to implement this on the Kronos, but it highlights a really simple feature that the Fantom has where in about two button presses it works exactly the way I want it. My personal financial situation isn’t great at the moment so bringing one home today wasn’t ever the intent, but I confess lack of funds wasn’t the only barrier for me today. I have no doubt this is a great board and with time I would conform it to my will (and maybe vice versa), but there were enough oddities that made it not a slam dunk for me.

Thank you for the answers and your time putting together reference guide links. Just a followup on the click question as I did find that page in the guide previously and it doesn't seem to indicate what I'm after - I don't want it always running; that would drive everyone nuts. I would like to be able to trigger "playback" of the metronome without actually having a sequence playing, and ideally with an assignable button on the left side of the keyboard, rather than the play transport button in the middle. Does it work this way or do I have to actually have a sequence for "playback" to work? Alternatively, is there an easy way to dedicate like part 9 to be a rhythm track that is just part of my template Performance, and if so, can I assign an assignable button to trigger this rhythm track? Thanks for the other answers. On the Fantom, VPiano only works in slot 1 and the tone wheel organ only works in slot 2. It would be nice if I could select which part the VCM effect could work in even if it were limited to just one instance at a time, but this wouldn't be a deal breaker; just not how I usually lay things out. I appreciate your time, TJ