But within this Home page is also the Motion Control area, which is arguably the most important part of Montage. There’s even a basic Sequencer on the main Home page of the screen, although I won’t touch too much on that – as I said in last month’s preview, Yamaha doesn’t want Montage to be seen as a workstation. The above Scene edits can be made by way of Montage’s huge touch screen, as can Part Mixing within a performance.

It’s also easy to assign these using the Knob Position and Assign buttons, so you can customise it to do what you want – even changing many FM parameters at once, something you wouldn’t have dreamed of doing with an original DX7 synth (unless you were prone to nightmares). This was the star of the launch of Montage at NAMM, a brightly lit dial to the left of the touch screen that alters a number of parameters simultaneously, so you could fade both cutoff and resonance, for example, or fade one up while the other goes down, all with one sweep of the knob! Scenes essentially give you variations within performances, increasing sonic flexibility at the flick of a button.īut if you think that’s cool, try the Super Knob. As we’ll see in the Performance Mode, these enable you to switch between setups of sounds: you might be playing a piano with strings underpinning it on one Scene, and then switch to another Scene and the string goes, or a choir appears. Underneath these, you have another eight buttons, lit blue, for Scenes. That’s just the start of the control side of things with Montage, though… It’s very easy to home in on a particular parameter and tweak it live or edit it.

You can switch between three layers of eight commonly accessed parameters (think filter cutoff and resonance, EQ bands and arpeggiation) and then make adjustments with the dials and sliders below them. In my preview, I detailed how this is similar to MOTIF’s way of giving you more hands-on control – perhaps the best you’ll find on any digital synth. For the control side of things, I’ll first touch briefly on the left hand area of the keyboard. Montage is all about these sounds,yes, but it is also about new ways of controlling them and playing them. As with the others, it comes with four main outs, USB (audio/MIDI), MIDI connections and audio input This is the rear view of Montage 6, the smallest synth in the Montage range. Then there’s the all-new FM-X engine which, as you’d expect, offers a huge array of FM sounds, a synthesis championed and made famous by Yamaha with the DX7 and now being used across all sorts of genres: from dubstep to shoegazing post-rock. (Not to mention my Roland D-20 did all of its sounds in around 32MB ‘back in the day’ – we’re talking huge now!). Of course, Hans Zimmer sample library users who have to clear around 200GB every time they want to play some of his percussion sounds might scoff at a mere 5.75GB, but when I tell you that this is eight times the size of the library on Yamaha’s MOTIF series – itself the standard bearer for digital synthesisers for a decade or so – you’ll realise this is quite a leap up, to say the least. AWM2 is Yamaha’s latest sample-based engine – think high-quality sounds of everything and you’ll be close. There are those two main synth engines: AWM2 and FM-X beneath an umbrella heading called The Motion Control Synthesis Engine. Specs-wise, I could go on and on – Montage really has big numbers backing it. These once-lauded ‘machines that can do everything’ were already taking a beating from DAWs that could also do everything and then along came analogue and seamless integration and the poor machines were left out of the party, stuck betwixt stools and as out of place as mullets in a Shoreditch beard competition.īefore that, we should talk sounds and Montage power. And when I say ‘digital’, I mean the type crammed with sounds, packed with features and also stuffed with enough gubbins to create complete productions, soundtracks, and albums in any genre, on any format, any time, any place. Where once the NAMM Show was about software emulations or ‘iPad everything’, the last couple have been about turning real knobs and switching real gear back on.Īrguably, it’s all part of a (perhaps) unconscious move by the production world to bring creativity out of a virtual environment back into a real one, with the software companies that once ploughed those pirate-laden waters now in on the act, creating hardware to seamlessly integrate their titles into a real, ‘non computer screen’ way (inMusic’s VIP, Ableton’s Push, NI’s Komplete Kontrol and Novation’s Launch range being perfect examples).īut one casualty of the rebirth of classic analogue synthesis (or perfect analogue emulation thereof), and the seamless marriage and transparency of studio hardware and software, has been the digital synth.

Yamaha montage 7 deals