If your last encounter with FM was a DX7 or one of its immediate derivatives, you’ll likely view it as both hard to comprehend and incapable of warmth. I’ve long been a fan of Yamaha’s FS1R rackmount synth and, while FM-X isn’t identical with this (in particular, it lacks the formant waveform and formant sequencing) it’s similar in many other respects. Having done so, you can arpeggiate the final sound to generate a huge range of high-quality patterns.Įven more pleasing (for me) is the inclusion of an eight-operator, 88-algorithm, 128-voice FM engine. The programming system is extensive, and you can apply the full force of the effects engine (which we’ll address in a moment) to the assembled kit.

The Montage’s drum sounds are also sample-based, and you can distribute up to 73 of these across the keyboard from C0 to C6, no matter which model of Montage you have. Then, when you’ve gotten to grips with a single Element, you can start combining Elements to create the complex sounds for which AWM2 is famed. If you have the inclination, it’s worth experimenting with single-Element Parts - you might be surprised at what you can achieve. Perhaps more impressively, it’s 67.5 times the memory of the original Motif! As before, an AWM2 Part can comprise up to eight Elements, each of which is a synthesizer in its own right comprising a wave, your selection from 18 resonant filter types, an audio amplifier, an LFO, multiple contour generators and a dedicated EQ. The Montage’s 128-voice, stereo AWM2 sound engine has been expanded to hold an equivalent of 5.67GB of waveform memory which, Yamaha tell us, is more than seven times that of the most recent Motif, the XF. By dispensing with the Patch mode and programming all of the sounds (up to 16 of them, called Parts) within each Performance, the Montage sidesteps this and you are able to edit freely. The problem with this was that, if you changed one of the underlying sounds to achieve a desired result in a given Performance, you would damage any others that used the same sound. In the past, when memory was neither plentiful nor cheap, the common architecture was to create individual sounds in a Patch or Program mode, and then combine these into more complex Multis/Combis/Performances that comprised numerous sounds split or layered across the keyboard, or arranged multitimbrally, as required. I have often wondered whether the world needs another synth with an on-board sequencer that will be ignored in favour of the likes of Digital Performer, Logic or Sonar (it doesn’t), so I am delighted that Yamaha’s programmers have invested their time and expertise on its sound.Īlthough it is 16-part multitimbral, there’s no ‘patch’ level for programming sounds: everything is done at the Performance level, which combines sound selection, editing, mixing, multitimbral assignments, and much more. It offers two sound engines (AWM2 and FM-X) that you can use separately or combine freely in composite sounds and multitimbral setups, plus highly evolved arpeggiation, multitimbral effects and a basic MIDI recorder, but no sampling capabilities and no audio/MIDI sequencing.

Perhaps the most important thing you need to understand about the Montage is that it’s a synthesizer rather than a workstation. With new firmware that includes sounds, additional effects, more flexible modulation routing, and additional programming screens and facilities, Montage v1.5 now seems ripe for review. Almost inevitably there were a few niggles with early units and, with some patches, some players reported a small latency between pressing a key and the onset of the sound, But any initial problems appear now to have been eliminated. There had to be a time when Yamaha would attempt to reassert their authority and, when launching the Montage, the company were clear that this had been designed to be ‘the’ flagship synthesizer of the current era. More recently, the Motif and its many spin-offs have been hugely successful, but even the most powerful of these were eclipsed by the Korg OASYS and Kronos. Further releases suffered at the hands of the Roland D-50 and the Korg M1, followed by the Kurzweil K2000 and the Korg Trinity. But in the late ’80s and ’90s the company seemed to lose their edge. In the 1970s, the GX-1 and then the CS-80 defined the forefront of analogue synth development before, in 1983, the company almost single-handedly destroyed the market for large analogue polysynths when the DX7 swept aside the likes of Prophet 5, the OB8, and the Memorymoog. Yamaha were once the unassailable titans of polyphonic synthesis. But does it have what it takes to be the market leader Yamaha want it to be? As its name implies, the Montage combines multiple technologies within a single, powerful instrument.

Yamaha montage future engine