YC61/YC73/YC88 Updates … good information:

https://usa.yamaha.com/products/music_production/stagekeyboards/yc/updates.html#product-tabs

Certainly did make me look! -- although it would have been more convincing if you'd written 'YC v1.2' 🙂

I'm beginning to really think there won't be a rotary update at all........ It's been so long that even the warranty on my external Neo Vent 2 replacement has now expired!

You have to wonder whether Yamaha have the expertise to solve the rotary problem - or whether it's a limitation of the processing power within the YC?

I am surprised they haven't addressed what are probably simpler requests --- like separate mono outputs for organ and keys -- or multi channel MIDI inputs ..
We know those have been requested quite a lot on Ideascale. (no where near as many times as a rotary update though! )

Yamaha certainly do seem to move 'in mysterious ways', on occasion..... 🙂

You clearly hate the keyboard. Why don't you just sell it?

You clearly have a problem differentiating valid criticisms, skepticisms, suggestions and humour from needless emotional responses to brands and products.

But don't sell out. You'll come good.

So with FM technology/engine the voices are literally endless. The engine algorithm program produces the voice.

No sampling memory being eating up or very little. If I decide to include this technology in a board but give it no means for existence what have I actually accomplished?

I think we've talked about all this before. What you've accomplished is simplicity, which addresses the biggest reason some people have avoided buying Yamahas, they found them too complicated.

And you can't just say "people who don't want to edit can ignore those features, so it adds no more complication for them"... but it does. Every unneeded menu option makes it more cumbersome to find the menu options you're actually looking for. The manuals get more complex. Single function controls become multiple function controls, you can find yourself accidentally in a wrong mode with a control then not doing what you expect. There will be more cluttered panel labeling (unless you expect these added functions to not be labeled). Other aspects of the architecture get more complicated, like, once you edit a sound, how and where do you store it? Right now, all user settings are stored in a Live Set. But that wouldn't be a great place to store a custom FM sound, because you wouldn't be able to access it the way you access the main sounds, meaning you wouldn't be able to split and layer with it, for example. So then you'd probably want to add an interface (at least still more menu options) for saving sounds in the various sound categories. And practically speaking, you still wouldn't be able to save very many, because scrolling through those sound lists would get unwiledly if they had too many items in them. I've written before about the 99 item limit of a 2-digit display... there were suggestions of ways around that, like a second bank of 99 indicated by a dot, or the use of hex... again, this is no longer simple! And who wants to scroll through a list of over 100 items anyway? Once you get beyond maybe a few dozen, you really want some kind of keypad entry (or touchscreen). Maybe you could repurpose the Live Set buttons to act as a keypad... again, you're adding complication, and creating modes where the same controls can do different things. I'm not saying they need to avoid anything that adds any complication whatsoever, but there's a balance, and if you're going to complicate something designed for simplicity, you need to limit the number of such changes you make, and really consider whether you're creating a benefit for many with minimal additional complication, vs a benefit for few with noticeable complication.

Even most people who bought a DX7 never cared to program it, they just wanted the sounds, and "just the most popular FM sounds" is what the YC gives you. If you want fully editable FM sounds, Yamaha offers the MODX, Montage, and Reface DX. If the YC is the perfect board for you except you need editable FM sounds, then you can take advantage of the YC's strong MIDI functionality and add one of the FM synths you can get on an iPhone/iPad or whatever. Yamaha did take the effort to build in a 4-zone MIDI controller function. It exists so that people who need something that Yamaha didn't build in may indeed have a way to add it. (Though I do wish they had built in a way to easily control the volumes of those sounds from the front panel!)

I always wonder what the price ratio or relationship is on these boards such as to take it to the next level, would it have only been $200 on the production end and maybe $500 on the consumer end?

Typically, $200 of production costs translates to more like $1000 to the consumer.

Wouldn't you want to dominate the market and have all the boards on every stage and in every video say YAMAHA on the back?

Yamaha kinda does dominate the market. I'm pretty sure they sell more keyboards than anyone else. (Well, they may have some competition from Casio, if you factor in all the low-end stuff.) They are also one of the few long-time players that hasn't flirted with insolvency at some point (AFAIK). It's a tough industry, and they have consistently succeeded. Korg, Roland, Kurzweil, Moog, ARP, GEM, Oberheim, Alesis, Ensoniq, Sequential Circuits, all had tough times, and didn't always survive them or ended up acquired by someone else. It's a tough argument to say that Yamaha doesn't do things well when they have consistently been the most successful brand in the industry. Which isn't to say that their boards are perfect by any means. But telling them what they should do to dominate the market is like telling Toyota what they need to do to dominate the car market. You're not really telling Yamaha how to dominate the market here, you're just telling them how to give David what he wants.

If you come at it from the perspective of Yamaha having developed the YC as a competitor to the successful Nord Electro series, their design approach here may make more sense to you. The YC targets potential Nord customers much more than it targets potential MODX customers who want deep programming abilities. Which makes sense. After all, they already have something for the potential MODX customers. 😉