Yamaha YC series firmware V1.2 update

[AnotherScott]

4 hours ago, Delaware Dave said:

The organ itself doesn't sound 'hammond-ish' to me in tone; it sounds more like a roller rink organ. 

 

Although probably most of the organs used in roller rinks were Hammonds. ;-)

 

When I briefly had a YC, I actually thought its raw tone was really good, it was only the Leslie aspect that disappointed me. But of course these things can be subjective.

 

4 hours ago, TomKittel said:

Good to know. I still remember the terrible pushback of the Kurzweil PC3-76 and the Artis 7 which made these boards unplayable for me.

 

Yes, as I've mentioned here in the past, I felt the same and swapped lighter springs into my Artis 7... which then made it one of my favorite actions.

 

4 hours ago, Adan said:

Even with the update, the YC gives you very few variations to choose from.  The YC, Electro, and Vox are similar in their "like it or leave it" approach, whereas Hammond gives the user almost endless customization.  I like the YC Hammond emulation.  There's a very appealing airy thunk to it.

 

Yes, Vox gives you almost nothing to adjust, which is a shame because its underlying CX3 engine actually has a lot of tweakability. I understand, there's no interface for it on the Vox, but a computer or iOS editor could conceivably get you a lot more out of that board, organ-wise.

 

Nord gives you more than the Vox, YC gives you a bit more than Nord, but yeah, Hammond is in a whole other league in terms of customization.

 

4 hours ago, Adan said:

Like Scott, I would say the Vox action is probably my favorite amongst current clones, though the SKPro and Mojo are a very close tie for second.  The YC action is lovely: silky and quiet, but the lack of high trigger and smaller width keys sort of take it out of the running for favorite clone action.  The YC action is a wonderful semi-weighted action for playing pianos.

 

I was pleasantly surprised by the SK Pro here, it felt better than I was used to most TP/8O boards feeling. (I've never played a Mojo.) Yes, I'd prefer the Vox action. I agree that, strictly for organ, I'd take the SK Pro action over the YC (for me, it's the combination of the low trigger with the low release and the initial "escapement bump"), but if you factor piano playing into it as well, that could sway me back to the YC61.

 

4 hours ago, Stokely said:

I haven't yet checked into whether the drawbars send midi cc (and not sysex) on the units I'm considering.

 

The YC's drawbars send CCs, but the auxiliary controls (i.e. percussion and C/V) do not.

 

4 hours ago, Stokely said:

As far as stiffness, would it be fair to say this is somewhere between the Mojo and an Electro?  Perhaps similar to a VR-700 (great action IMO).?

 

It's not as heavily sprung as an Electro. (I haven't played the Mojo.) It's different feeling from the VR-700 at least because of that "escapement bump" which I think aids piano but is a detriment to organ. I'd still give the VR-700 the advantage in action overall.

 

The reason I think the initial resistance helps piano is that it stops you from too easily striking a key you didn't intend to hit, which can be a problem on non-hammer actions, and is probably part of why Nord uses stiffer springs. But Nord's approach yields resistance over the entire travel of the key. Yamaha's approach "releases" that resistance at a certain point, giving it a lighter feeling overall, and not pushing back at you when the key is fully depressed, as the Nord does.

 

2 hours ago, drawback said:

I can see B-3X, but what would you want from Module that isn't just as good if not better on the YC?

 

Off-hand, it could give you the other clavinet sounds (the pickup positions that are not available in the YC), and some nice mellotron sounds (YC only has the strings), and voice/choir sounds. I guess it depends what you're looking for, but after all, the YC still only has 148 non-organ sounds to choose from, Module gives you a whole lot more, especially if you have expansion packs.

[dickiefunk]

2 hours ago, AnotherScott said:

 

Although probably most of the organs used in roller rinks were Hammonds. ;-)

 

When I briefly had a YC, I actually thought its raw tone was really good, it was only the Leslie aspect that disappointed me. But of course these things can be subjective.

.

Yes i think the raw Hammond tone is very good as well.

[Pigmeat]

I installed the update and I love the rotary now.  I'm playing it though a pair of QSC K8.2s and it sounds great.  I bought the YC61 to replace my Mojo 61 and I'm very happy with my decision.  Thanks Yamaha!

 

I picked up the YSC-YC61 Custom Soft Case recently too - I love how small and light this keyboard is.

[nursers]

Just did update and was flawless and yes the rotary is a definite improvement to extent my YC 61 will be part of my gigging rig going forward. Very happy!

[Outkaster]

Man I have to download it.

[kenheeter]

Bought a YC61 (again!) today.

 

[kenheeter]

I was going to get the YC73 but when I read Pigmeat's post I remembered how much I liked the size and weight of the 61 so I went back to it.

 

[AnotherScott]

Something I just noticed... the velocity curve feature is not the same as what they did on the CP. On the CP, you could define 3 global adjustments... one for all the Piano sounds, one for all the EP sounds, and one for all the Other sounds. On the YC, you can define it independently for each non-organ sound in each of your Live Sets.

 

Similarly, picking up from the earlier comment about Nord giving you more customization than Vox, and YC giving you a bit more than Nord... a lot of the adjustments that Nord has that are global can be independently saved in different Live Sets on the YC, meaning that the YC can have user organ presets with different amounts of click, different amounts of leakage, different Leslie parameters, etc., whereas on the Nord, those things are shared by all your organ presets.

 

(Also a correction to earlier post, the YC has 2 mellotron sounds in it... besides the strings it has the flutes.)

[CyberGene]

How good is the YC61 keyboard for piano playing and Rhodes? I have a MODX6 and find it pretty good (when you take in mind I'm a piano-elitist and hate every digital piano action and can only accept real grand-piano actions as in my AvantGrand N1X 😀). I mean, since I didn't buy the MODX6 for piano playing, I had low expectations and it positively surprised me that I can actually play pianos on it and they sound much more controlled than what I imagined was possible from a synth action.

 

But the YC61 is targeted at Hammond organ and maybe it's not that good for acoustic and electric piano patches?

 

And then, how "worse" is it for piano patches compared to a CP73? Compared to a CP88?

[rogs]

9 hours ago, AnotherScott said:

.........meaning that the YC can have user organ presets with different amounts of click, different amounts of leakage, different Leslie parameters..........

 

 

I hadn't realised that at first.  The new 'Studio' rotary preset means that the adjustable 'Leslie' parameters now make a lot more sense - and are much more effective than they were on the previous rotary sims.

But having set up the speeds, acceleration, etc on one preset I was surprised those new settings were not transferred to  my other organ presets.

No big deal of course, now that I know. And it might be interesting to adjust horn v. rotor levels according to the voicing for example?

I think I shall probably set up the speeds accelerations and decelerations to be consistent. 

I remember back in the day how much you could vary these on a real Leslie  by physically adjusting the actual belt tensions....

Time to try and copy some of my favourite 'real' Leslie settings again....

[AnotherScott]

5 hours ago, CyberGene said:

How good is the YC61 keyboard for piano playing and Rhodes? I have a MODX6 and find it pretty good (when you take in mind I'm a piano-elitist and hate every digital piano action and can only accept real grand-piano actions as in my AvantGrand N1X 😀). I mean, since I didn't buy the MODX6 for piano playing, I had low expectations and it positively surprised me that I can actually play pianos on it and they sound much more controlled than what I imagined was possible from a synth action.

 

I think YC61 has one of the better semi-weighted actions for playing piano and Rhodes, better than the MODX6/7. Out of the box, I didn't like the MODX7 for piano at all, but with some adjustment to the velocity curve, I likewise ended up finding it surprisingly usable for pianos, though still not among my favorites as non-hammer actions go. The YC61 benefits from that "escapement bump" I mentioned earlier, which provides a bit more initial resistance which I think is useful/desirable for the pianos, while still not adding a lot of resistance overall (unlike the heavily sprung TP/8O actions from Nord and Dexibell, which give you, not just an initial resistance, but an increased resistance you feel throughout the travel, and related heavy "pushback" after you've depressed a key). So from the start I thought YC61 felt better than MODX6/7 for piano, but controllability was still something of an issue... in fact, I had posted on ideascale that, in addition to their existing "wide" dynamic curve option, I'd wished for a "narrow" one. But it looks that may be addressed now with the new touch sensitivity options. 

 

5 hours ago, CyberGene said:

the YC61 is targeted at Hammond organ...how "worse" is it for piano patches compared to a CP73? Compared to a CP88?

 

The differences are in both feel and sound.

 

In terms of feel, I didn't like the CP73, I thought it felt kind of "dead," but I suspect that the new touch sensitivity options might provide a big improvement there. I thought the feel of the YC88 (which should be same as CP88) was excellent, though. But since you've hated all hammer actions short of your AvantGrand (and prefer the MODX6), it's hard for me to rule out the possibility that you might actually like the YC61 action best of the bunch. These things are subjective, after all.

 

As for sound, the CP has some additional piano sounds that are not on the YC.

 

4 hours ago, rogs said:

But having set up the speeds, acceleration, etc on one preset I was surprised those new settings were not transferred to  my other organ presets.

No big deal of course, now that I know. And it might be interesting to adjust horn v. rotor levels according to the voicing for example?

I think I shall probably set up the speeds accelerations and decelerations to be consistent. 

 

Yes, the saving of these parameters for each Live Set is a double-edged sword. It's nice that you can have the sounds of very different "Hammonds and Leslies" for different user presets, but it can be a pain if you settle on one "favorite" set of basic organ/rotary settings, and need to copy all those parameters into each of your organ presets. Ideally, there would be a global adjustment, which would be the default, but you'd be able to over-ride those settings if and when you wanted to. Same with the Touch Sensitivity settings.

 

I think this would be helpful as a shortcut, though. Set up one Live Set (say, the last one, #160) with all your favorite organ/leslie/touch sensitivity settings. Then whenever you're creating new sounds, start from that one as your base. That should speed up the creating of your new custom sounds that will already have your favorite organ and touch settings, if you have a preferred default that you'd generally like to be consistent. 

 

As for copying your new preferred settings into pre-existing patches (which you especially might want to do if you already have some custom sounds that you created before doing this update), I wonder if the new John Melas Editor might make quicker work of copying settings from one Live Set to another.

 

ETA: Related to this, but also getting back to my earlier comment about the Nord offering more adjustability than the Vox... well, yes and no. While the Nord has a bunch of additional parameters you can change compared to the Vox, they are global. The Vox doesn't let you specifically go into a menu and change some of these things as you can on the Nord (leakage, for example), but the Vox has different presets with different settings, which can give you a different way to create an organ patch that has, for example, more or less leakage. Again more like the Yamaha in this respect, some of these settings then are only adjustable preset-by-preset, and not globally... but they ARE adjustable. You have to think about it a little differently, though. (It's the VC, what else is new?) Instead of there being any menu to adjust leakage or some other available tonal characters, you instead find a factory preset that has the attribute you want, and then build your sound off that.

[eric]

I asked about this in the YC vs. CP thread, though I don't know if this exists in the YC...does the YC have a CP-70 or CP-80 electric grand sound? If so, is it comparable to the CP version? I ask because use CP-70 sounds probably more than acoustic piano sounds. Sorry if I missed this anywhere in the lengthy related threads. Thanks!

[AnotherScott]

10 minutes ago, eric said:

does the YC have a CP-70 or CP-80 electric grand sound? If so, is it comparable to the CP version? 

 

Yes, the YC has the same two CP80 sounds that are listed for the CP.

 

Since this kind of question seems to be recurring, I'll mention that you can see all their current sounds by downloading the supplemental manuals for each board (the original manuals only include the sounds they originally shipped with, and not the ones that were added in updates).

 

YC Supplemental manual: https://usa.yamaha.com/files/download/other_assets/9/1382649/yc88_yc73_yc61_en_sm_b0.pdf

 

CP Supplemental manual: https://usa.yamaha.com/files/download/other_assets/7/1243337/cp88_cp73_v15_en_sm_e0.pdf

[Josh Paxton]

Whoa, just saw this thread. Off to do some updating...

[GovernorSilver]

The most interesting part of this vid to me is when he plays with the drawbars for the FM organ at 4 min.

 

 

[Outkaster]

9 hours ago, CyberGene said:

How good is the YC61 keyboard for piano playing and Rhodes? I have a MODX6 and find it pretty good (when you take in mind I'm a piano-elitist and hate every digital piano action and can only accept real grand-piano actions as in my AvantGrand N1X 😀). I mean, since I didn't buy the MODX6 for piano playing, I had low expectations and it positively surprised me that I can actually play pianos on it and they sound much more controlled than what I imagined was possible from a synth action.

 

But the YC61 is targeted at Hammond organ and maybe it's not that good for acoustic and electric piano patches?

 

And then, how "worse" is it for piano patches compared to a CP73? Compared to a CP88?

It's awesome.  Nothing to worry about.

[johnnyd]

Told myself after I got my RD-2000. This is my last board...WRONG!!!

YC-61 on the way..  he... he... he....

[ElmerJFudd]

12 minutes ago, johnnyd said:

Told myself after I got my RD-2000. This is my last board...WRONG!!!

YC-61 on the way..  he... he... he....

That’s a nice pairing! 

[pinkfloydcramer]

8 hours ago, Josh Paxton said:

Whoa, just saw this thread. Off to do some updating...

If you had not encouraged us to click our heels and say "better fast leslie" 3 times, none of this would be happening! Credit where credit is due..🙂

[TomKittel]

On 2/23/2022 at 3:41 PM, Delaware Dave said:

The organ itself doesn't sound 'hammond-ish' to me in tone; it sounds more like a roller rink organ.  The leslie is improved...

 

Maybe this demo will change your mind?
 

 

[AnotherScott]

Okay, I did it. Having bought and returned a YC61 in 2020 and a CP73 in 2021, I just bought a YC73, and updated it to the new OS. I remembered from the livestream that the board now defaulted to the new Studio rotary effect as RTR A, and the original one, Classic, was now RTR B. So first thing when I turned on my updated YC, I activated the Organ section with RTR A and started playing with it, eager to hear the organ improvement. I couldn't believe it, the fast Leslie was awful.

 

Well, silly me, I forgot that, when you first turn it on, you're not in any kind of plain "vanilla" starting state, you're in Live Set #1. And none of the original Live Sets have been changed, so Live Set #1 is still programmed to employ the old Leslie if you activate the organ and Leslie panels. To hear the new organ, you need to navigate to one of the newly provided Live Sets that came with the update (the ones in banks 12 and 13), or an INIT location (where indeed the default RTR A is now Studio), or manually go into the Settings menu of the old Live Set you're on and change its rotary setting.

 

I've hardly had a chance to play with it yet, but the new velocity curves make the pianos/EPs MUCH better. It's not "dead" anymore. This looks like a keeper.

[drawback]

My 61 should be here in about a week and the first thing I'll do is the update, set up an organ/leslie pairing I like, and go from there. 

 

I came across this video strictly for the Rhodes sound set. Of course the OS update on the Leslie makes the organ usable, and you know what you're going to get from a Yamaha in terms of AP quality, but this demo nailed the sale for me.

 

 

 

[CyberGene]

@AnotherScottplease keep us posted about how you find the keyboard, especially for controlling Rhodes and acoustic pianos. I’m interested in the YC73 but it will be available only after 2-3 months at Thomann 😕 Which is why I ordered the YC61 instead but I may return it and replace with a YC73 and wait for it, I’m not in a hurry anyway. 

[timwat]

Boy howdy - can Pete Callandra play?

 

Nice to see a stage in the background, but I wish there was less tremolo used throughout the demo. Sure it's pretty, but I'd prefer to hear the raw tone without any garlic.

[drawback]

40 minutes ago, timwat said:

Boy howdy - can Pete Callandra play?

 

Nice to see a stage in the background, but I wish there was less tremolo used throughout the demo. Sure it's pretty, but I'd prefer to hear the raw tone without any garlic.

My pet peeve is phaser/flanger! I only use tremolo/vibrato as a sweetener. I have the Kronos trem ifx set up on my dual pedal so the left (normally soft) pedal triggers tremolo only while it's held down. Highly doubt the Yamaha will let me do that, though.

[Josh Paxton]

I did the installation and spent the last couple hours playing, tweaking and comparing. It's a serious upgrade. Like, "Is there any reason to keep my Mojo 61 now?" serious. I won't know for sure until I take it on a gig or two, but right out of the box I'm seriously impressed. Nice going, Yamaha!

[nadroj]

Has there been any other board in recent memory where a firmware update has taken it from zero to hero? It seems like the YC actually became a pro-level board overnight, which is wild (and a good sign of the times).

[Al Coda]

19 hours ago, drawback said:

My 61 should be here in about a week and the first thing I'll do is the update, set up an organ/leslie pairing I like, and go from there. 

 

I came across this video strictly for the Rhodes sound set. Of course the OS update on the Leslie makes the organ usable, and you know what you're going to get from a Yamaha in terms of AP quality, but this demo nailed the sale for me.

 

 

 

 

This sounds great !

Rhodes is the most important sound for me when it comes to "just only playing" ...

 

Question:

How good is the MIDI implementation in regards of controlling other "non piano" sounds from external keyboards?

At least organ and clav would be candidates for waterfall action,- and a lot of "other" sounds for a quality diving board synth-action.

Any experience from users of YC61 / 73 / 88 already?

 

☺️

 

A.C.

[AnotherScott]

13 minutes ago, Al Coda said:

How good is the MIDI implementation in regards of controlling other "non piano" sounds from external keyboards?

 

Each of the three sections (organ, keys a, keys b) can be set to be played from internal keys, external keys, or both. Each user preset (Live Set) can be set however you want.

[octa]

1 hour ago, AnotherScott said:

 

Each of the three sections (organ, keys a, keys b) can be set to be played from internal keys, external keys, or both. Each user preset (Live Set) can be set however you want.

I've been wondering if there's a way to assign USB audio, like an iOS synth, to external keys. Looks like it might be an "Advanced Zone" situation?

 

Played a show last night with the new update and organ sounded excellent. Not going to be needing B3-X anymore but will still be using other VST's occasionally.