![]() ![]() There are 10 piano sounds and each of them is excellent thanks to Yamaha’s proprietary Pure CF sound engine. So, I began with the piano sounds and I was quite impressed with the piano sounds on offer. The Yamaha DGX-660 also features 554 voice options which also sends further warning bells ringing when you are after quality. This is often the biggest concern with digital pianos in the sub-$1000 price range. Overall, initial impressions suggest that if you want to get a great digital piano without breaking the bank then this one is definitely worth a look. The upside to all this is that the Yamaha DGX-660 feels quite sturdy and planted. It is deeper than most digital pianos and that adds a bit of girth. Its dimensions and weight suggest that it is more of a place it and forget it type of digital pianos. Even though the Yamaha DGX-660 is marketed as a part of their portable line-up, it exactly isn’t something that you would be willing to lug around from gig to gig. It is meant to be as versatile and practical as possible. ![]() However, look a bit closer and you will understand why the Yamaha DGX-660 looks the way it does. The speakers could have been done without the dual-tone accents and the roundish edges of the digital piano give it a somewhat somber appearance. It oddly resembles one of those cassette tapes from afar. The initial impression is that it is not very refined when it comes to the looks. The aesthetics of the Yamaha DGX660 is a tale of two sides. The technical specifications of this digital piano suggest that it is highly versatile but can it live up to the much more expensive flagships or will it have glaring flaws in its sound quality and feel? Let us find out. ![]() The Yamaha DGX-660 is by no means priced as a flagship digital piano should be but has many of the features of one at least on paper. I haven't tested any of this myself, but I feel sure this is going to be your best resource.One of the biggest USPs of Yamaha’s electric pianos is that they offer a lot of bang for the buck. The best resource I know of for this 3rd party software is curated by a chap called Jørgen Sørensen on his site - The Unofficial YAMAHA Keyboard Resource Site On two pages he has links to all the known editors for Yamaha keyboards. All 3rd party software will have had to try to reverse-engineer how the algorithms are applied. Unfortunately, the exact details of how this was done I have to keep to myself even to this day.Īnyway, the background aside, I still don't think there is a dedicated publicly-available Yamaha resource to handle these files at consumer-level. Even more complex algorithms for other scale & non-scale notes were capable of keeping the whole thing sounding reasonably musical. Much smarter algorithms could dictate quite clever re-voicing to make a player's voicings always appear to move to the nearest 'good' note for the chord, with correct voice-leading etc. Whether it was simple transposition of the entire chord - the simplest was to transpose in parallel, up until a certain key, then wrap over to transpose down. There were some rather sophisticated algorithms & different rule-sets which dictated which note went to where on transposition, & these rules could be set per track/instrument by the programmer. Using C Maj7 as the base data gave each note a 'function' from which the ABC could be calculated. The note function & movement was then re-calculated live during playback. So, my information is 20 years out of date, but these styles were always actually made in a static C Maj7 chord. Lower models would be handled by another team, who trimmed down, re-voiced & re-edited from the data we made for the top models. I was part of Yamaha's writing & mixing/editing team who made the internal styles & a lot of the first release-cycle of the then-known 'disk styles' you could buy, initially for the high end products such as the PSR-6700, right up to the last before I left, the PSR-9000 & Tyros. I used to, in the 90s, actually make these things for a living -) I haven't worked there for 20 years, but I don't think that has changed in the intervening period. As far as I'm aware, Yamaha themselves never released a style editor to the public. ![]()
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