@Paul - just for fun, why would adding a modest 8-16 voice VA need to involve the "Wave Processing" side? If you take a wild-ish guess that one single SWP70 can only comfortably handle 12 DSP effects for the voices + 3 Master effects (as in the MODX), then that could possibly mean the Montage has the potential of 15+15 DSP effects. Well, except for the detail that the master SWP70 has 32MB of DSP ram and the slave only has 16MB. Not sure how this would affect the whole thing.

Seeing as we're already in a flight of speculative fancy, that's the equivalent of about 10-11 available DSP effects. Of course, they could already have fixed routing that would preclude using them as VA oscillators and/or being fed into filters, EG's and VCAs. And maybe they would need their own DSP effects as well. So, 8 voices anybody??

Anyhow, in the back of my mind there's always something nagging at me about the odd UI choices that seems to leave conspicuous amounts space for the AWM2, FM-X, AWM2+FM-X icons.... and something else. Yamaha isn't usually so, ummm, loose with their icon positioning. Maybe it's just my imagination though 😀

Hi Michel --

I tend to think of the internals as a tone generation front end followed by a flock of small DSP units in the mixer/effects back-end. This seems to be the canonical Yamaha pipeline. In Montage/MODX, some of the small DSPs are routed as insert effects and some as system/master effects. (The effect routing in Genos, BTW, is different and probably different in the high-end digital pianos.) I suspect that the data flow is predominantly (solely?) front to back.

I don't really know if the small effect DSPs are general purpose or not.They are probably small simple cores because an SWP has at least 15 and real estate is limited. (Lower capacity parts like the SWXs and SWLs have far fewer small DSP cores.) A small core may not have much throughput and the front-to-back dataflow might prevent feeding data from the DSP cores back to the filters, etc. in the front-end. [You mentioned this concern, too.]

There is also the issue of getting note and controller data to the effect DSPs in the back end. Note and controller data are delivered on the E-bus directly from the key, knob, slider, etc. scanning processor(s) to the tone generation core. Does all E-bus data get back to the small DSP cores? Maybe not...

Overall, even as a consumer, I would be happier with a dedicated SSP2 for VA. The VA SSP2 would inject its digital output stream into the existing mixer/DSP infrastructure.

The VA SSP2 gets its own DSP RAM and NOR flash for program, and the processing is totally out of the way of FM-X and AWM2. It would be possible to implement different VA algorithms without making compromises. Yamaha could periodically offer new engines as updates/upgrades.

Watch, they'll come up with something completely different. 😀 Maybe an SWP71. There were different spins of the SWP50 family, so why not? 🙂

From the marketing point of view, demand for VA is sufficiently high that they may require everyone to buy a new platform anyway. Perceived value added and all that.

Gotta go back to practicing -- pj

Thanks for sharing your insight here, PJ. It's great food for thought.

Following from your speculation regarding the specialized nature of the SWP70, I'm now especially curious as to how exactly FM-X is achieved. Could it be entirely a clever re-purposing of the AWM2 synthesis pipeline, or is there any specialized circuitry involved which is related to FM specifically? Could a pair of SWP51 processors (Motif XS/XF) become a dedicated FM-X synthesizer (with limited polyphony) given the appropriate software? What other synthesis methods might the AWM2 pipeline be capable of being re-purposed for? Could something approximating Waldorf-style wavetable synthesis be possible? Perhaps by utilizing the whole architecture (all 128 "oscillators" ) for a single voice, something like granular synthesis could be achieved? That's a bit of a stretch, maybe.

Fun stuff to think about.

Speaking of DSP, the successor to SSP2 is recently available and, not surprisingly, it is called SSP3 DSP 🙂 it is currently used in the new UR-C Steinberg sound cards. Will we see it in the new Rafece at Namm 2020? UR-C Series SSP3

why va?...its just a fancy other method, of what you can already do, with the awm2 engine, i mean if you are looking for the typical vangelis blade runner slow lead brassy sounds,
they are not hard to program, i have made a rough estimate preset, with just one element, the "101 Saw" as building block, and some tweaking of the filter envelopes
and the "de-tune" fx on top of that, and voila...and i haven't even used the extended lfo for it, just the normal one.

sure its not a exact copy, of the vangelis cs80 sound, but it sounds good, and pretty close too.

i cannot think of any other synthesis method, that is so radically diferrent, that generates sounds, that neither fm-x, or awm2 cannot do, and is musically usable of course.

and i have a old supernova 2 keyboard, so i can compare the methods somewhat.

Regarding tone-generating DSP, we've got something new to talk about here: the YC61's VCM Organ engine. The question is, what hardware is providing the muscle?

why va?...its just a fancy other method, of what you can already do, with the awm2 engine,

That's an inaccurate gloss of AWM2 vs virtual analog synthesis and completely overlooks a variety of fundamental sound-shaping capabilities.

Here are some unique sonic aspects of analog and virtual analog synthesis:

- proper PWM (sorry, PWM via FM-X is a limited approximation)
- oscillator cross-modulation
- hard/soft-sync
- continuously variable waveshapes (eg. sine to triangle to saw to square)
- oscillator feedback (sounds different from FM feedback)

Sampling the above is often quite unsatisfactory as the results of are often quite static/repetitive and you lose the articulation and realtime control.