Im going to call it a hoax.
The pictures are basically identical to Ex5.
Surely we're not going back to a small screen!

The pictures are basically identical to Ex5.

Not even close!

EX5 only had one smaller screen and doesn't have all of those extra knobs.

Opps sorry, I was looking at the wrong picture.

The image in this thread of the EX5 I posted was to show 6 knobs under the screen which happens to match the count of knobs under the screen of the photos floating around of something called "Montage M6/7/8x". I did this to counter some other analysis that suggested these knobs are copying a Roland keyboard.

I don't know that these 6 knobs are in any way related to the EX5 in function - but it's an interesting coincidence.

Darn you mean it's not the EX5 coming back again with 8 times the DSP? That would be pretty cool. Any newly leaked documents? My Deckard's Dream "CS80" is on the UPS truck out for delivery. So it's not actually a CS80 but we've all dreamed about owning one most likely and this is as close as I might get today. Iconic sound and legendary status. You know what I will be doing later.

I've just watched a video which seems to suggest that the new Montage won't have all the Part Select / Mute, Seq, Arp buttons over on the right hand side. I ended up buying my current Montage because they were missing on the MODX and I'd got used to using them on my MOXF.

I really don't want to be messing around with a touch screen to perform these functions, so if they are missing, the new Montage is not for me sadly.

@John I am only going by what we see in the pics that were leaked, but it appears that they may have just moved the buttons to the left side, and possibly have a new dedicated display on the top left for the visual part..!?

I too have gotten used to the buttons on the right, so if I were considering the new Montage M, I would likely hold judgement until we find out what the new workflow will be. The new way may not take much getting used to and could possibly be better than what we're used to..!?

But I doubt that anyone will need to use a touch screen for this functionality that we're used to via buttons... 😉

@Darryl Thanks for the reply - fingers crossed then 🙂

The earliest timestamp I see on the photos is April 8th of this year. That's 6 months before the launch. Also, one week after April Fool's Day (not that it means anything).

Main point being - assuming the photos are real - no telling if they represented the latest snapshot or not. It could be information older than 6 months at the time of launch. That's certainly enough time to change silkscreen color and maybe more revision changes.

Sneak peak

Yeah, there wasn't any mention on the forum when I went to look at the sneak peek(peak[sic] ) of the next Montage.

https://www.yamahasynth.com/learn/news/new-yamaha-synthesizer-sneak-peak

I went to the pictures first. There's some clear detail that wasn't so clear before. Like how the set of buttons under each fader are for part select, keyboard select, or mute(shift), solo (shift). Which also helps explain why there's an extra shift key here -- to make mute/solo button pressing a one hand operation with the two buttons at a time.

This helps to show that there is some parity between the Montage Classic and next Montage in terms of button pressing capabilities even though the cluster of buttons on the right hand side of the keyboard shrunk a little.

In the past I just used Mute/Solo for page up and page down -- so that's not a big deal to me to lightly bury the mute/solo.

There's a screen with a lot of boxes that's totally different from what we have today. So the UI looks revamped either in part or whole.

The ribbon controller looks like it has LEDs which is something I've asked for before. Asked for mod wheel lights too (because the internal setting could be different than the physical position) but it doesn't look like this happened.

The tracks of the sliders are illuminated now. That's new. In one picture they look yellow and cyan in another. So I'm guessing these are RGB and maybe different sliders can become different colors although there's nothing showing anything other than all sliders the same color. It'd take more gpio resources to have individual control.

Speaking of LEDs - there's more standard colors of them now. The grid on the right hand side for what seems to be category search and number pad-ish is a new green color. The new buttons under the sliders where the scenes used to be looks like a different color of blue (lighter shade). These don't match the slider colors - so I'm guessing these buttons have a fixed color.

Even though it's blurry in the picture featuring the knob above the [ASSIGN] switches - there is indeed as others have pointed out a knob there. I would guess it's for either A/D input gain or USB gain or both.

No real new clues that I could detect regarding the six knobs below the touchscreen.

Lots more good information conveyed here.

On to the sounds -- the naming of the sounds is interesting. A little bit of a departure from the way sounds were named in the past. I'm not sure if these are final actual names or just abstracted names (which it seems like). If they are the actual names - then maybe this also means there's a lot of new samples (and/or approaches) to get these sounds.

Several of the sounds showcased are what I would say are "big" sounds. That's a good thing. The Orchestra thing seemed to have more than just the tremolo and sfz features (assign 1 and 2 type stuff). I guess the different instruments could be note range and tympani or not could be a scene button. Still, I wonder if there's more than just the assign1/assign2 (like Genos super articulation).

I wonder what interested Saul and it looks expensive but might still be modular of offer plug-ins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-RHxiqB3dw

[quotePost id=123077]The earliest timestamp I see on the photos is April 8th of this year. That's 6 months before the launch. Also, one week after April Fool's Day (not that it means anything).

Main point being - assuming the photos are real - no telling if they represented the latest snapshot or not. It could be information older than 6 months at the time of launch. That's certainly enough time to change silkscreen color and maybe more revision changes.
[/quotePost]

After seeing the sneak peek, I agree. The piano-like keys in the sneak do not have texturing. I think the earlier pictures are a sound development or pre-announcement review unit. The contouring on the new chassis body looks more refined and finished.

Glad to see that sneak peek. Thanks, Blake. This is a more sensible and cost-effective approach to building excitement than ridiculous and over-produced teaser videos.

-- pj

No real new clues that I could detect regarding the six knobs below the touchscreen.

There is one pic that shows 'Rev Time' and 'Reverb' on the small screen with knobs 5 and 6 right below the graphic display.

My guess would be that different screen selections would show actual values for the knob settings. And that the set of graphics would be similar to the previous printed set of graphics that
you chose using Tone, EG/FX, EQ and the like.

Another pic shows they may have implemented something I think was on your wish list: ability to feed Var directly into Rev instead of having them only in parallel.

That pic appears to show the UI may be more ICON based with a set of icons on the screen rather than selecting from a menu.

On the bottom row you can see 'Arp', 'Motion Seq' and 'Controller' icons with a 'Part LFO' above
the Arp icon. This seems to correlate with the 'Edit - Partn - Common' menu that is on the left now.

The upper right quadrant seems to have icons for the 'Effect' page. I can just make out what looks like an 'Elem LFO' icon with an 'Elem EQ' icon above it and that block has an orange arrow
going to Var, Rev and MFX icons to the right.

Interestingly the 'Var' icon shows an orange arrow going to the 'Rev' icon. as well as directly to the MFX icon.