It's the most bizarre of possible releases during this time.

and yet... Korg Nautilus, Hammond SK Pro, Kurzweil PC4-7...

Manufacturers work with long time lines. And they could not have predicted how much longer covid would last when they went into production, and it would be a different risk to hold all production until it was over. And as it turns out, people are buying them anyway, so it's a good thing.

I just checked thomann, and out of 19 items in the organ category, for last month, the YC88 came in #3 (and YC73 at #9) - https://www.thomannmusic.com/topseller_GF_electric_organs.html

At Musicians Friend, they put them in the stage piano category. Out of 54 items, the YC73 is #20, the YC88 is #21. Not bad. Though if they lumped the combined sales of the two models into one listing item (as they did for two versions of Korg Grandstage, two versions of Nord Electro 6D, three versions of Casio PX-S1000 all of which came out above these two Yamahas), it might have come out higher. https://www.musiciansfriend.com/stage-digital-pianos

Next you're going to wax lyrical on the accuracies of Amazon reviews.

Or forget that the Nautilus is a workstation, great for working on... somewhere like at home.

As is the new Kurzweil.

The YC series are not workstations of any sort. They're live performance tools. Can you acknowledge this?

How about being able to acknowledge that Nikon and Canon have stalled releases of their absolute best cameras until the Olympics are on?

Nikon's bodies, as they shift to Mirrorless, are vastly more complex and significant to the well being of the company than an electronic stage piano is to Yamaha.

Yet they're not nearly as tone deaf.

Organs, you say... reminds me that most churches and houses of worship are shut, too.

Next you're going to wax lyrical on the accuracies of Amazon reviews.

Next you're going to tell me the moon landing was faked. 😉 I doubt that a site's algorithm to rank an item's sales is being manipulated to favor one manufacturer over another, whether by a music retailer or by Amazon for that matter.

Even in a period of greater uncertainty, if you've got product sitting in warehouses because production was planned many months ago, it's probably better to be selling some of them than none of them. And at least relative to other boards, these seem to be selling pretty decently.

Giggers can decide to buy something that appeals to them even if they think it may be 6 months or whatever before they gig again. And it is not only giggers who buy "stage keyboards." I can certainly see the YC series appealing to many home-based musicians as well. Or home-based musicians who may simply play out every now and then.

As for Nautilus/PC4-7, workstations are popular choices as gigging boards. In fact, one of the arguments in favor of buying workstations at all is that people who gig often prefer to have everything self-contained, whereas at home, it is comparatively easy to connect to a computer, so the need to have all that functionality in your keyboard is reduced. I bet more people are gigging with workstation-style keyboards than are gigging with boards that have drawbars.

Still the most bizarre of all is a broken rotor sim still on-going.

YC61 was introduced on Jan 9, 2020 and we are in March of 2021.

There was C19 so that's understandable or would have been except that they built and released the 73 & 88.

Priority 1 is to fix the sim so apparently resources weren't an issue during C19.

You have to wonder what is going on at Yamaha. 2 new organ focused boards with non-organ keys.

I kind if like the 73 action better anyway but wasn't organ the focus of this series? I'm confused.

I do admit I don't play exclusively organ BUT I love to layer organ into the mix.

I'm not the primary market research poster child however.

It seems like they added the 2 piano and 2 key voices to promote the 73/88 more than fixing the broken sim.

They are sort of abandoning the primary YC purpose of organ and shifting back toward stage piano.

Perhaps YC61 was a market research gunny pig released ahead of time as a test and they always had 73/88 in the background.

We know they didn't read way down the priority page of IdeaScale and suddenly decide everyone wants a 73/88 and then produce these overnight.

Something is strange at Yamaha. Backup planning perhaps.

All speculation except nothing to speculate about the YC organ sim and they still haven't fixed it.

YC could reach legendary status if they really fix the sim, add more modeled organs, add more layering waveforms and allow FM to be customizable.

Some have pointed out the architecture and interface are severely limited so nothing legendary is going to happen.

Why is there not a direct screen output port or cool app where you can remove the screen to your device and put it anywhere you want so you can read it?

Such as in daylight or for outside events etc. It's simple to conceive of and not high tech for 2020.

They tend to assume you're always in he dark, have 20/20 vision and/or don't need to read it anyway. Who at Yamaha thought this was a good idea?

I'd raise a good argument that many players over 50 who happen to have money might be interested in clearly visible sight-line interface technology.

I think my flip phone from 2010 has far more advance capabilities. Just really odd decisions and I know it began with the CP series so they recycled the same screen.

Sometimes it's the very little things that make an enormous difference between selling 200 units and 2000.

I bought an overhead microscope projector that enlarges the screen by about 3x. Anyone know of a prism invention that you can sit on the LED surface that will change the angle and enlarge the screen? That would be a nice invention for all types of vintage synths and YC etc.

Yamaha knows a tilted screen is a convenience because CP1 has it and Genos. Why only on the $6K units? How difficult and costly is it really to angle up a tiny screen?

Engineering could not figure this one out. Maybe NASA could. Tony Stark would laugh at Yamaha over fixed and flat screens. I'm an engineer so Yamaha can hire me to figure it out.

It's just dumb in 2020. Every convenience is supposed to move forward in future designs and not backwards.

This is like buying a car that still has manual roll-down lever windows. Maybe they stall make those, I don't know.

The Yamaha NTS (Never Touch Screen) management is back in action. I know, someone will post that Yamaha saved $9.99 per unit by not adding "modern" (really old) convenience.

Yamaha is an old school Japanese company, run by descendants and appointees of predecessors.

The company came to prosperity through a riding and catering to the manufactured need for recognition of classical music prowess as a marker of intellectual and cultural standing.

Having spent nearly a decade in Japan, and studied their culture, economy and beliefs, I can assure you these two things nearly completely explain Yamaha's decision making.

Nintendo is the exception, not the norm.

The CS-80 was the greatest anomaly of all time.

Until the Andromeda A6.

They could reach total domination by a few hundred dollars more per unit. I always wonder why they stop just short of perfection or short of legendary.

I think they do this intentionally so we'll buy the next series. It's a game plan to do just enough until the next release.

Bait and switch strategy to sell it just enough to keep it going. The Yamaha fan club loyalists will bite every single time and they count on it.

Yamaha is the guru of that philosophy. Design or the conception is their own worst enemy at times.

Other companies are surpassing Yamaha's old school approach and offering more interesting and practical designs.

I was surprised by the LED sliders on the YC draw bars.

They got out of the box on that feature however they have been on track recently to fancy-up the interface with the BIG exception of the display.

I'd have twice as much fun with YC if it was expanded internally (I don't mean by adding useless noises like gun shots) but with "other voices" layering sounds.

I like to layer a lot and you're thru most of the internal contend within a few turns of the dial.

Someone will reply to get the Montage for thousands of waveforms but YC could have more than 160-ish.

They are good sounds but Yamaha's content libraries are limitless. I still wonder how limited the internal memory actually is.

They advertise it as "EXPANDABLE" when technically that's true but it's not practically true and they will almost never support it beyond 4 or 8 waveforms added per year.

More bait and switch advertising.

Who wants to wager that over the entire lifespan of the YC, Yamaha doesn't add more than 20 new waveforms to it?

That's about 12% or so. Hope I'm way off but I'm not holding my breath. SKpro might replace mine in a few weeks anyhow.

I continue to not understand the basis for "bait and switch". Features are well articulated and everything promised is delivered - despite the record of your insisting that updates are not coming and the product(s) is(are) abandoned. Updates may not live up to your expectations - but everything that is done is transparent. Future development plans are not divulged and this upsets people - but that is hardly evidence or an example of "bait and switch".

It would be delusional to think a product is going to either transform into something it isn't, into something that has been released in the past, or into some competitor's product. I really see no surprises here. No bold promises that are not delivered.

The only example I can site of such a thing was an early "promise" that Montage would add compatibility with the WXC and other encoding that prevents previous promotional material (like Inspiration In A Flash). More than intentional bait-and-switch - I think this is a case of an employee "breaking rank" with the usual SOP to be more tight lipped about futures. And an example like this is exactly why the policy to "not transmit features early" is adhered to. At least one of the reasons. Competitive reasons is probably another reason to keep futures close to the vest.

I don't see any examples for the recent products in the CP/YC line.

Certainly you're free to express the difference between your needs versus features the product delivers. "Get in line" and patiently wait for change that may never come. You're one in a sea of users with often competing wants and desires. The boat steers slowly. Stay positive. There is no conspiracy against you.

I think the support structure (systems, people) has its good and bad days like anything else. On balance, I see more good than bad. I think the intent is generally in the right place.

I do realize and admit that I expect too much of Yamaha.

I think you're overthinking it.

The YC series is a response to the Nord Stage 2, specifically, the EX of about 2015.

At that point Yamaha realised the premium stage keyboard market looked solidified and self sustaining, to Yamaha execs, and they examined what they understood of the Nord Stage 2 EX... and aimed for where the puck is, or just barely further ahead, not where it's going to be further on, over many years...

Then they released it, in its full sized stage glory... during a pandemic.

Similarly, across a very similar timeline, the Montage is a response to the Roland Jupiter 80 (JP-80).

When you understand what the JP-80 is, and where it fell flat, you can see that's the same areas the Montage is flailing. Yamaha didn't even bother reading user reviews, nor sentiment towards the JP-80.

The success of the MODX is misunderstood by Yamaha. And the technology within it (and the Montage) is insufficiently powerful for any kind of serious additional features, as it wasn't ever deemed necessary for it to have the horsepower for anything like (even) dynamic viewing/display of operational activities within the device.

It could run a step sequencer, but not a proper note editing sequencer with animated and scrolling timeline...

Notice how slow the screen responses are on the MODX/Montage... that's a horsepower limitation, not bad programming.

So these products are going to be odd little halfway houses, in between Motif and whatever's next... which will be Yamaha's response to the success of the ZenCore's multi-platform integration and the Roland Fantom 6/7/8 - this will be out in about 2025, but will probably not involve the concession to using standardised and more powerful, general purpose CPUs.

That's another, further hardware generation away.

Great software will trail the use of more powerful and standardised hardware by another few years, since it's now become insanely difficult (and expensive) to collate, corral and curate a good team of specialist programmers.

My gosh the Montage is ancient now I order mine back in 2016. It will be almost 10 years old if what you say is true about 2025.

The selling gimmick was the touch screen and super knob but why so underpowered? How much did processors costs in 2016?

By then Roland might have the Fantom X available. I sold my Montage because, like you said, way underpowered.

I'll never understand the underpowered dilemma. If they want Montage to hang for 10 years the power should have been doubled.

Let's assume if a part costs $250 extra and so the unit price goes up by $500 to cover it. Might have been worth it. If the part is $500 then $1,000 more per unit. Might have been too high but if production prices fall over 10 years then maybe not.

It's all about headroom. They might not want headroom so they can move on to the next series. 10 years doesn't follow the Yamaha trend but I'm sure the next Montage is in the design stages. Yes it will be underpowered again for the time period. Par for the coarse but by design most likely.

CPU costs (for off-the-shelf products) are, as you say, differences of a few hundred dollars.

However, Yamaha has a long history of attempting to make a point of difference through partnered custom CPU creation and usage, with highly specialised coders working on the DSP for these chips, in somewhat of an isolation from the rest of the world of programming.

This then requires the creation of entirely customised Operating Systems to run on these chips... and this is where the costs and time problems go crazy, along with huge limitations on design and interface capabilities.

And that's what's slowed them down to their glacial release pace, more than anything else, I suspect.

Getting out of this rut requires admitting the costs and efforts put into these customised CPU architectures and operating systems need to be written off. That's a very difficult thing to do, especially if it's a source of pride and much of the knowledge and expertise gained isn't transferrable to a newer, more standardised CPU model.

By comparison, the Korg Nautilus and Kronos are running what's basically Linux on a VERY, VERY old general purpose Atom CPU, from Intel.

All three Japanese companies (Korg, Roland and Yamaha) bought heavily into the notion that there'd no longer be a workstation market, post iPad launch, and that they could focus on making keyboards with all other features, and leave DAW functionality to PCs and iPads.

Roland was the first to backtrack on this approach, having felt significant negative blowback from the JP-80 not having the traditional and expected workstation functionality.

Korg has kept the Kronos going for so long precisely because they weren't working on a replacement (which the Nautilus is not, it's a stop gap until they have a full new workstation ready to go).

Yamaha thought the combination of their timing and the power of FM with effects plus Motion Sequencer and "SuperKnob" would be enough to cement themselves a marquee product without traditional workstation features.

The problem with adding traditional workstation features is the design, programming and development time - it's a gargantuan effort to get it to all work alongside a fully active sound making system within customised hardware on a largely customised operating system... and you can't be sure how successful it will be, because it's difficult to know what a good workstation experience looks like AND to get programmers to actually make it wonderful.

Yamaha seems to have lost an enormous amount of programming talent across the last 10 years. Probably to age based attrition into retirement of their finest leaders and head-hunting from rivals, combined with not understanding the need to move beyond outsourcing to insourcing over that same period, as the demand for great programmers escalated far faster than the supply.

And it does take GREAT programmers to do both DSP optimisation and OS works on a custom platform. So much so that Yamaha never got around to corralling them under the guidance of a UX expert, so we get the awkward workload of hashing through the operation of the Montage/MODX. Nothing about it is intuitive and efficient as a result of this.

// This is probably why the FM editing is so limited on the YC series - no way to find a way to make a minor editor design for FM and get it done in a reasonable time frame, including the screen presentation of how to do it, etc.

Similarly, even if the Montage had enough power to run a sequencer of notes, with animated note events and scrolling timelines, how were they ever going to design a sequencer AND get the programmers to integrate it into how the arpeggios and Motion Sequencer operate?

So they scrimped on performance in the CPU and "GPU" aspects of that CPU, even more.

That CPU 'budget' is, I suspect, the reason for the straight line envelopes, as they're much, much faster to calculate at rapid rates than exponentially curved envelope shapes... where aliasing would become an issue if the processors couldn't keep up or shortcuts had to be taken to maintain polyphony when animating lots of properties.

It is truly remarkable what they've managed to coax out of the CPUs in the Montage in regards to Polyphony, Effects and Animation.

But the Montage is going to struggle against the Fantom for a good long while.

The MODX is very lucky, it sits in a market price segment where there's no real competition.

The YC series is really just a price conscious alternative to the Stage 3, riding on the brand name and reputation of Yamaha and its relationship with FM.

And its timing is so bad that I don't know what to say about it that could possibly give you hope that they'll get around to making the rotary simulation all you want it to be.

{DAVID}There was C19 so that's understandable or would have been except that they built and released the 73 & 88. Priority 1 is to fix the sim so apparently resources weren't an issue during C19.

You are using the existence of the CP73/CP88 during covid as "proof" that they don't care about the rotary issue...?

First, products have long lead times, and the CP73/CP88 was probably well into development before covid.

Also, someone's idea of "Priority 1" is based on everything that is more important already working right... but the reason everything else is working right could be because those things were higher priorities. Or maybe just simpler. But there are a whole lot of things someone might call priorities if they weren't behaving as you'd like, execept Yamaha got them right before you ever saw them. IOW, everything that is not a priority (because it IS working the way you expect) is something that took resources, too.

Mostly, though, we have no idea what resources they put into it. They could have put plenty of resources into it, but not been able to crack the nut. There are hardware and software limitations in what can be retrofitted into an existing design. We don't know what limitations they're working within, what resources were applied, what resources are still being applied, and whether there will or will not be a satisfactory fix. Your comments about how much of a priority it is to them is only speculation.

You have to wonder what is going on at Yamaha. 2 new organ focused boards with non-organ keys.

I kind if like the 73 action better anyway but wasn't organ the focus of this series? I'm confused.

I do admit I don't play exclusively organ BUT I love to layer organ into the mix.

I'm not the primary market research poster child however.

On the contrary, you could well be part of the primary market for these boards along with all those other customers who have been buying the hammer action versions of the Nord Stage and Electro models, Dexibell Vivo S9, Kawai MP7SE, Kurzweil SP6... all pretty straight-forward multi-function "stage piano" kinds of boards, with full tonewheel organ engines that have front-panel adjustable drawbar levels. (In fact, unlike the YCs, all of those even support a high trigger point for the organ!) It sounds like you're strangely complaining that they made a board that is actually a kind of board you'd want to buy.

Someone will reply to get the Montage for thousands of waveforms but YC could have more than 160-ish.

The board is about immediacy and simplicity, and not endless menu diving. Sure, they could use some more, and I hope we'll see them. But it's not designed to have a ton of sounds. As I mentioned elsewhere, the LED displays only support 2 digits, and who even WANTS to scroll through a category that has more than 100 sounds to find the one you want? Sure, they could provide alternate mechanisms, shortcuts, etc. (in fact, they do provide some of these) but a board like this is basically designed to be dirt-simple to operate for someone who doesn't even open the manual. So a relatively small sound set is not an unjustifiable design decision.

OTOH, they did build in a very extensive 4-zone MIDI controller function. So you can also integrate tons of sounds from, say, an iPhone or iPad.

{ANDREW}The YC series is a response to the Nord Stage 2, specifically, the EX of about 2015.

No, I'd say it is a very capable competititor to the current Nord Electro 6. It is priced in that range. Nord does have a few advantages of its own, like custom sample loading, a huge library of loadable/replacable sounds, high trigger on the organ, and being able to send the organ out its own output. But the YC has a ton of advantages over the Nord, including what I think most people would consider to be better actions, 4-zone MIDI controller functions, pitch bend and modulation controls, drawbars with LED indicators, monophonic synth sounds with portamento, built in USB audio interface, freely assignable split points, non-piano sounds with multiple velocity layers, FM sounds generated by an FM engine instead of as samples, LED ring endless encoders, the ability to split/layer three sounds where more than one sound can be something that isn't a piano or organ. (That list does include some things Nord has only put in the Stage series, but without a knobby VA synth, it's hard to see the YC as a direct Nord Stage series equivalent, I think that comparison is off the mark... which is no shock, considering the price difference. Though it may have enough Nord Stage features to persuade some people to buy it over either an Electro OR a Stage.)

Similarly, across a very similar timeline, the Montage is a response to the Roland Jupiter 80 (JP-80).

I think that comparison is pretty wild. How do you see them as similar?

Sound generation:

Main acoustic sound emulation...
Montage = large selection of deeply editable sample-based sounds, plus custom samples.
Jupiter = much smaller selection of minimally editable sounds that combine sampling and modeling, no additional samples or models loadable.

Synth engines...
Montage = FM
Jupiter = VA

MIDI functionality? Sequencer functionality? Split/layer functionality? Effects functionality? DAW integration? I can hardly think of two "full function" boards that are more dissimilar. If Montage was an answer to Roland's Jupiter 80, that answer in words must have been "well, let's make sure we don't do anything like THAT!"

{DAVID} Let's assume if a part costs $250 extra and so the unit price goes up by $500 to cover it.

Niche market boutique gear sells in relatively small volume (Apple sells far more iPhones in a day than Yamaha will sell Monatges over the entire life of the product). R&D, fabrication, and other overhead gets amortized over a relatively small number of units. Component cost increases typically have to be multiplied by a factor, not of 2, but of more like 4 or 5 (sometimes more) to get an idea of how they affect retail price. (Also, nnot only does the manufacturer have to make money on it, but so do the distributors and retailers who stand between the consumer and the manufacturer.) So that $250 part cost increase probably raises the retail price by something in excess of $1000.

{ANDREW}However, Yamaha has a long history of attempting to make a point of difference through partnered custom CPU creation and usage, with highly specialised coders working on the DSP for these chips, in somewhat of an isolation from the rest of the world of programming.

This then requires the creation of entirely customised Operating Systems to run on these chips... and this is where the costs and time problems go crazy, along with huge limitations on design and interface capabilities.

There are also significant benefits to the embedded systems approach you're basically describing, which as you kind of point out, is what everyone uses except Kronos.

Yamaha is less custom than they once were. You can see the open source/GNU releases and notices to track where Yamaha synths cut over to a Linux based host operating system.

This level of the CPU still does very little critical work. DSP and custom ASICs handle the timing-critical stuff. This is where deterministic polyphony comes from as opposed to the Korg model which throttles according to the host CPU utilization.

... back to the rotary speaker - a recent article shows what the pros do:

https://www.yamahasynth.com/learn/Artists/neil-tankersley-rig-rundown

Although a real Leslie is the primary path for rotary speaker - the backup is the Ventilator rotating speaker sim. Good enough for a gig if the Leslie is on the fritz.

There are (2) types of FM. The tinny FM that's just okay (FM-X or YC or FS1R version) and then the jaw rattling kind that you can feel in your bones.

I've only experienced the later on my very limited CP1. It does a total of (4) FM voices but the low end is amazing.

It rings out like a gong in the room.

YC allows multi-FM layers which helps but I still don't feel it that much.

I'll be checking out the OPsix to see how that feels. I go by feeling and not by sound with FM.

When you feel it you can't stop playing it, I don't know how else to describe it.

Kind of analogous to a limited piano layer waveform where you punch the lower end and nothing happens, you feel nothing.

Then you move to a real piano and the room shakes. There is FM that can do this but it isn't your granny's FM either.

It still sounds pure and pleasing but you can still walk away from it. Not so with the real deal FM, it's hypnotic.

When they say YC has pianos and FM it's still your granny's voices.

It's impossible to recreate the CP1 dynamics with boring traditional AWM2 sampling & economical FM.

Sad that we all can't feel that presence on an affordable board. It is 2021. It is possible but no one wants it for whatever reason.

If you've ever played on a PSR in Sam's Club that sounds almost as good as my 2K unit. Samples are samples and are never going to wow us completely.

I had the Genos (flagship technology) and it couldn't make me feel it either. It was, well, still tinny.