The new flagship keyboard adds a vintage feel to its powerful sound engine
>Having discontinued the original Montage earlier this year, Yamaha has now unveiled its latest flagship synth workstation: the Montage M. Like its predecessor, the Montage M packs a variety of different sound engines into a single instrument, targeting pro-level gigging musicians and those looking for an all-round studio workhorse.
The big new addition for the M is the AN-X engine, which is a virtual analogue generator aimed at replicating the sound and feel of vintage synths. The name is inspired by the company’s much-loved AN1x, a late-’90s VA synth beloved by the likes of Jean-Michel Jarre and Boards of Canada, although the new technology is only loosely inspired by the AN1x’s design. The AN-X engine makes use of a classic analogue-style setup boasting three oscillators with a choice of five waveforms (two saws, triangle, square and sine), a noise generator, two filters with a choice of ten filter types, ring modulation, pulse width modulation, a waveshaper and more. If you want your synth to sound more ‘vintage’, you can dial in some voltage drift or make use of the ‘ageing’ functions. Beyond these more prominent VA elements, the Montage M comes stocked with many more varied and modern sounds, covered off by improved versions of Yamaha’s pre-existing AWM2 and eight-operator FM-X engines. In total, the engines are capable of a whopping
