TJ Cornish

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.