I would love to know what Yamahas R& D Department were thinking. These are the same people that did some form of research and came up with a product called "reface" which had mini keys and could be bought as a collection of four mini key synths to get the full range. Who did they have in mind for this project? Munchkins?
And now we have this new product called montage. Who is it aimed at? All the demos so far that I have listened to did not blow me away either in terms of the realism of the sounds or the creativity to make the sounds. It seems the product is designed to compete with Roland Jupiter 80 performance synthesiser.
How many musicians do you know that own the Roland Jupiter 80? ......
This synthesiser is geared towards tweak head synth purists. This has to be a niche market and won't have any mass appeal. For the most part, the demos simply show off the motion sound features of this instrument. But that seems to me to consist of an old man simply holding a chord , jigging and manically bobbing his head to a paper thin beat and letting the sound change and morph for the next five minutes and faking he likes what he hears . Even the great Yamaha champion Berts demo looked like he genuinely did not know what the products main features were supposed to bring to the party musically . And he is the best Yamaha salesman out there .
Not really demos geared at musicians I know . But then I am in my mid forties . I don't play that kind of music.
I have been on the Yamaha motif forum and the musicians forum and the general feeling is what is this keyboard meant to be ?It is a performance synth with 16 tracks that can't be edited much in anyway on the machine . It has no sampler .
And it sounds ok regardless as to what synth engine is used . I am just scratching my head on this one .
There just are to many contradictions in this product....
When you take away most of the functionallity of the basic sequencer then you can expect people to use a DAW for that functionallity like extended recordings and audio and midi creation... How smart is it then to also remove the DAW controlling functionallity..
This also is in contradiction with the full usb audio interface functionallity straight out of the box, ready for full DAW integration, and then they decide to not add a pc editor, which also is used to embed the Motif as a VST in your DAW..
And then they left so much soundengine out of the box, it makes the Montage rather thin in options not only compared to the JP80, but espescially to the Kronos... Not only the fact that they didnt add a VL or AN engine... But many other AWM features seem missing, SCM for piano samples, SA2, the Ensemble feature of Tyros... These are all thing one would expect in a Yamaha instrument that is announced as a TOTL performance synthesizer...
And only 16 part multitimbrallity where T5 has 32, and 128 voice polyphony for AWM2, where their piano's have 256 and up..
For that kind of money, i would have expected more...
However, still i think the Montage is a powerfull instrument... But its not something many people will NEED to have.. Its nice to have, and still trailing Kronos...
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