Yamaha Montage 8 5-stars Reviews

This is the best workstation

This is the best workstation I have had, it is possible to develop its performance and to develop myself

Overall sound quality is stunning; wide, clean and precise with enough warmth and sheen. Yamaha's acoustic sounds are also beautiful here and the CFX/ Bösendorfer grands sound gorgeous, the clavinets are now more authentic and the EP 'gallery' performances are great. The acoustic guitars are also killer (especially combined with the arpeggiator) and the strings, brass and woodwinds are very inspiring.

You can also import your own 44/48kHz WAV samples from a USB stick and use them as you would any other element and there's 1.75GB of user flash memory, so once imported you can hold your samples/third-party libraries in memory for instant loading and retention after powering down. Also note that Montage is backwards compatible with Motif XF AWM2 voices too.

Finally, you can drop your performances into 'live sets' for easy selection and the slick 'category search' function makes it easy to put performances and live sets together quickly from the 1,000s of presets/ user sounds available.

Now some 'to-be-aware-ofs'! Firstly, there's no dedicated 'clonewheel engine' and, though there's a pretty tweakable rotary-effect and some good-sounding B3 emulations onboard, if you want the eight faders to operate as drawbars you have to set them up manually which is time-consuming.

We'd really like to see Yamaha launch some new performance templates where the set-up and routing for drawbars and percussion/vibrato is all done/ pre-wired. Secondly, while AWM2 does a great job, there's still no dedicated virtual analogue mode and it would have been great to have the killer-sounding modelled analogue engine from the Reface CS included (which feels more analogue-like than AWM2 does).

Thirdly, we would have also liked to have seen the superb 'spectral component modelling' sounds/engine from the Reface CP and CP4 included, as they have some killer EPs, clavs and Wurlis onboard that often rival or surpass the ones onboard the Montage. And finally (unlike the Motif XF), there's no direct sampling or multi-track sequencing, just a bare-bones 16 track 'recorder' with basic editing (hence the 'Music Synthesizer' label vs the Motif's 'Music Production Synthesizer' label).