I certainly don't have real organ expertise. I turned off my speakers & went to the headphones to get a more intimate sense of the rotary. It does seem to wobble within a tight field side to side. Seems to only partially shift off center and back again. I have no other boards to compare it to but I used to own the Montage and Genos which I didn't test to this degree.I wonder if more organ adjustments can be added to the menu such as the spread of the rotary effect within the sound field. Doesn't this also depend on the speaker position & placement of the real organ within its environment or proximity to walls & other barriers etc.? I did switch my YC sound to mono and it got worse or far less defined.

I set the speed to (top to bottom in the menu) 50.5; 41.1;499.6;300.3 which seems to smooth out the transition between fast and slow.

Hi this is Jim #1..AKA YamahaJim.. I own a MODX7 and a YC-61 and IS NOT the same Leslie effect as on the MODX.. It has 1/2 the Settings.. Why???? You can get a Much better Rotary speaker out of the MODX.. I also have a "B with a 122 Leslie" which neither can compare, But I really hope they look into all these complaints..The Leslie Effect on the YC-61 is Seriously a Let down!!!. It Kicks a$$ every where else, so Yamaha,STEP UP and FIX THIS!!!! I'm Counting on You!!! Thanks..

I have to agree. I have a Genos, a MODX and a Neo Vent. The Leslie engine on my new YC61 pales in comparison to any of them. No matter how I adjust it, there's very little Doppler effect or stereo spread. I watched the Yamaha YC61 Developer video on YouTube and they had plenty of real Hammond organs and Leslie cabinets in their labs so I'm baffled about the lack of attention here. The one thing they did get right is the variable rotor noise.

Several of us have commented about this over on Ideascale and there are about 15 votes for improvement so far.

I've had my YC61 for a couple of weeks. It is a very powerful, well thought out keyboard but is is promoted as an organ first and for several reasons in my opinion it fails. The rotary sim is just terrible, there is a strange detuning of some frequencies and it's just not up to today's standards. I have a B3 and 122 Leslie as well as a Crumar Mojo 61 and a Nord Stage 2. The YC61 sim doesn't sound even close to any of them. The other issues I have with the organ are: high trigger should be possible, the C3 is too strong and overpowers the organ sound, it needs to be adjustable wet/dry or depth, and it would be great to see an editor. I hope these features will be implemented in future OS upgrades. All of the other features are great and it is extremely powerful in terms of being a midi controller or slave. I don't think I can gig with the organ the way it is.

I suspect Yamaha will knock this out of the park on the next big OS update. Not sure when though as that depends on whether they primarily want to address just this feature because as Ken said, if the customer can't gig with the instrument for its organ reproduction, then Yamaha is in small trouble for the moment. The instrument's primary focus is organ reproduction or simulation. I'm not an organ guy so I have zero idea if it's right or wrong. If they decide to package this improvement with a massive update then it might be a while. Better late than never but now that it's been brought to light as an issue it's probably coming real soon. What's frustrating is that they will never tell you when but a ballpark ETA would be nice to know for those waiting around to gig with it. I'm always thinking that manufacturers get the product to market while they tinker with the nuances no pun intended. They also like for us to get our opinions out there before they invest in more improvements. Now with the expandable architecture, getting products out faster is even more tempting. Like with the Montage, being clueless about what the improvements are is incredibly frustrating. I sold my Montage 8 but then bought another one, the 6, after OS V3.5 just to mess around with it.

I wish they had put as much effort into the rotary sim as they did with the background noise.........

I actually expect the possibility of intervention like with the Neo VentilatorII, i.e. also adjust the microphone distance, the 800 Hz separation between rotor and horn and and and ...
In Germany, the YC61 is currently offered at 300-400.00 less than two months ago.
All the possibilities are unbeatable for a stage keyboard. But buyers expect first-class B3 sound, especially with this variant with a waterfall keyboard. If this is realized in an update, the sales figures will rise again sharply.

Hi, I have a B with a 122 Lesile, it's a older setup,but its "The One".. Heres some downloaded info on TRUE Leslie 122 Speeds..On both settings, the treble horn rotates slightly faster than the bass woofer; about 50 revolutions per minute (rpm) for "chorale" and 400 rpm for "tremolo",

A Leslie 122 has different possible horn fast-and-slow speeds, which you select by moving the belt to a different rung on the capstans.

And yes, I do kick myself from time to time for letting it go when "newer, better" keyboards started coming out

Yeah, "progress" does not move in only one direction. 😉 I remember when I moved from the S30 to the MOX6... big improvement in most ways, but lost the aftertouch, and I never got as good a tube overdrive organ sound out of the MOX as there was on the S30.

It's interesting to see so many people praising the Montage/MODX Leslie effect, since (as Jason said) one of the most common complaints I see about those boards is that the rotary effect isn't great. (Of course, it is not marketed specifically as an organ, either.)

own a MODX7 and a YC-61 and IS NOT the same Leslie effect as on the MODX.. It has 1/2 the Settings.. Why????

Half the settings? I'm not seeing that much difference from the manuals... looks like just a few more settings on the MODX to me, like mic angle...

No matter how I adjust it, there's very little Doppler effect or stereo spread. I watched the Yamaha YC61 Developer video on YouTube and they had plenty of real Hammond organs and Leslie cabinets in their labs so I'm baffled about the lack of attention here.

One thing about real Leslies... plenty of doppler, but not a ton of stereo spread per se. After all, the left and right most extreme of the moving sound source is measured in mere inches. The "stereo" is essentially created from the resulting room reflections... outdoors you probably wouldn't notice much "stereo" from a Leslie at all. That said, one common way to mic up a Leslie is to put two microphones on the top. Depending on how you pan those mics in the mix, you can get plenty of stereo effect... but that's not a natural Leslie effect. Unless maybe you're listening to the Leslie with your head 6 inches from the horn... which no one would want to do for long.

"One thing about real Leslies... plenty of doppler, but not a ton of stereo spread per se. After all, the left and right most extreme of the moving sound source is measured in mere inches. The "stereo" is essentially created from the resulting room reflections... outdoors you probably wouldn't notice much "stereo" from a Leslie at all. That said, one common way to mic up a Leslie is to put two microphones on the top. Depending on how you pan those mics in the mix, you can get plenty of stereo effect... but that's not a natural Leslie effect. Unless maybe you're listening to the Leslie with your head 6 inches from the horn... which no one would want to do for long."

I am far from a B3/Leslie expert...have not sat in front of real ones in years...but I have listened to a representative number of rotary sims. The Neo Vent which is still identified as the gold standard by most, provides the perception of a wide stereo spread. I think this appeals to people because of what they're used to hearing in the headphones...not sitting in the audience at a concert. To me, the YC sim is like the sitting in the audience sound...but with some irritating beating artifacts at certain frequencies that you don't hear so much when playing in a live setting (I did once this past summer) but you sure hear it with headphones on. Going off the reservation a bit here...most of the revered rotary sims today are like California Pinots...big and fruit forward....you really hear the swirl in your headphones. The original Pinots from Burgundy are leaner and drier. I think maybe, in part, we've become accustomed to the sound of the California style rotary sims and feel unsatisfied when we hear something that's trying to be truer to the audience version. That said, Yamaha needs to fix the problem with the artifacts.

I haven't heard a lot of praise for Montage's rotary simulator. There was a lot of noise about how it was "weak" - a prelude to the YC61 feedback. The response was to tweak the distortion a bit (and maybe more). The main positive feedback regarding the latest rotary speaker sim came from Blake who digs the dirt in the 2nd rotary sim of Montage. I agree that being able to dial in dirt is better. But the air still doesn't quite get that "wow" factor that other modeled rotary speakers get.

And, as I've said before, a contributor to Yamaha programming content and also one of the biggest/baddest advocates for Yamaha gear in general Ujiie seemed to ding Yamaha for their rotary simulation. At least in 2014 - the Motif XF era - which was largely what Montage is built upon in terms of effects. There's a lot of that carry-forward today.

Here's the line:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58CRo8Kwm1w&feature=youtu.be&t=855

... where the admission/suggestion is made to add a Ventilator because that pedal "nails it" while synths, including Ujiie's favorite Yamaha gear, fail to.

I pointed this out a while back as a way to challenge Yamaha to rise to the implicit challenge. Give Ujiie, product specialists, and users alike all something to rally around as "it". Not needing to buy competing products to patch up weak areas.

I can understand if something like Montage is too "Swiss Army" to do any one thing perfectly. That perhaps due to having to cover so many bases some resources had to be "stolen" from one area to allow another area to exist. But I'm not convinced these effects are quite limited like this. Or at least that something more dedicated like a YC61 would have any different effects story/limitations than something like Montage. So I was expecting a bit of "cut and paste" from Montage to YC61 and am not surprised the YC61 is starting at basically the same place Montage left off - being far behind a popular external pedal.

wide stereo spread. I think this appeals to people because of what they're used to hearing in the headphones...not sitting in the audience at a concert.

Could be... but I wonder how many recordings of bands with Hammond organs actually are mixed with a substantial left-right pan of a pair of upper Leslie mics for a wide stereo spread. I'm not sure I've ever heard tremendous stereo spread on a Hammond sound in headphones except when they're plugged into a clonewheel. 😉 At any rate, as I said, wide stereo spread is not an inherent quality of a Leslie speaker... but that's not to say that people may not find it pleasant or useful if and when it is implemented.

And in fact, even though wide stereo spread per se is not inherently authentic to the Leslie speaker itself, I think it can be used to increase authenticity. Take the hard stereo spread of a pair of (virtual) mics on the horn, and send it to a pair of stereo speakers that are placed right next to each other, angled slightly apart from each other. That could give you a more authentic imaging of what a Leslie would sound like in the room, i.e. placing the speakers such that they reflect the emulated positions of the microphones on the Leslie. (OTOH, taking such a signal and sending it to the main L/R FOH system would create an emulation of a rotary speaker that is perhaps 30 feet wide. 😉 )

the admission/suggestion is made to add a Ventilator because that pedal "nails it" while synths, including Ujiie's favorite Yamaha gear, fail to.

I pointed this out a while back as a way to challenge Yamaha to rise to the implicit challenge. Give Ujiie, product specialists, and users alike all something to rally around as "it". Not needing to buy competing products to patch up weak areas.

To play devil's advocate here, I think it is notable that the Vent came out ten years ago, and it still arguably beats every other emulation. (And it's not just the rotary effect per se, it's also the overdrive and amp/cabinet coloration characterstics.) One possibility is that simply no one else has come along with the combination of ears and engineering skills to do as good a job. People sometimes have unique talents that cannot be readily matched elsewhere. Another possibility is that others could do it, but no one has figured out how to do it for less than the $500 of a Vent. That is, even if Yamaha could do it, they may feel it's not worth a $500 increase in the price of the YC, if that (or anything close to it) is what it takes in the electronics/processing requirements to get that sound. Yamaha may feel that, at that point, it could cost them more sales than it would gain them. Especially since anyone who really wants it still has the option of spending $500 and buying a Vent. (That said, as I've mentioned before, the ability to send the organ sound of the YC to its own output would greatly improve the usability of that option for those who want it.)

Regardless of any of that, though, from what I can tell, there are other clones out there that, even if not of Vent quality, do have rotary emulations that are arguably better than the YC's, so whether of Vent quality or not, hopefully we will see some improvement in an update. Though again, there is a matter of taste and application. A few years back, Nord added a "close" microphone option to their Leslie sim, and a lot of people prefer it, it does provide a more "in your face" effect... but it's good that it's switchable, because some people still prefer the other.

I bought my YC61 in May this year, and realised quite quickly that the rotary sim was the weakest part of the package. There have been no updates since I bought my YC61 (the only firmware update so far dates from April - before the unit was available in many areas) so I decided to bite the bullet and go for a Vent 2.
It makes a huge difference -- even to those of us who only play for fun at home..
On the odd occasion I do go back to listen again to the internal sim, I find myself asking quite how a company with Yamaha's reputation ever allowed that sim to be released in a new flagship organ based gigging keyboard?
It is pretty poor - especially on the fast speed - It MUST be affecting sales, surely?

I 'borrowed' Ujiie's chord sequence from the link in Jason's post #23 above and created a similar (but not as professional 🙂 ) sequence on my MOX6. Using that, I played a (simplified) similar lead part on my YC61, patched through my Vent 2. I found it a much more rewarding overall sound then trying the same thing using the internal rotary sim on the YC61.
You can find the result here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5q9quiTBVg Only a couple of minutes long....

One more thought about stereo spread... you can certainly get a good rotary effect in mono. I've played more gigs in mono than in stereo, and had good rotary effect. Or listen to any of the Vent samples, and play them back in mono, they still sound good. Spread is not the big issue.

To me, the most easily identifiable problem with the YC effect is that it's "shallow," particularly on the low rotor, where you have to listen hard for the effect; and the speeds, even at the slowest settings, don't seem to go low enough, especially for the slow (chorale) mode. Both of these can easily be demonstrated even by just hearing the brief audio sample on the Leslie wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_speaker - As far as I can tell, you cannot get that much sense of motion out of the lower speaker nor the slow speeds as demonstrated in that sample out of the settings available in the YC.