Nicola
April 14, 2008

Rating: 10/10

tootally loving this!! has the best sounds ever! love the keys, its like playing a real piano. we have our own pa and amp system but serioiusly this keyboard/piano has a brilliant watt output, for smaller gigs no need plugin in!! easy display, alot of buttons, but easy to figure out how everything works. songs easily learnt for beginners with wait on note system and sheet music displayed for both hands. brilliant and at an excellent price, fair play to yamaha.

briliant service from dolphin music, ordered it thursday morning, had arrived by friday dinner time!

Jim
March 13, 2008

Rating: 10/10

We bought the DGX 620 so that our children could practice piano in between their lessons. We're not musicians so we didn't want to spend thousands on a first (traditional) piano that no-one would end up using. The DGX 620 sounds great, plays well, looks good and is great value for money. It's got a full-sized keyboard but the whole thing is compact enough to fit into our kitchen where everyone (including mum and dad) is tempted to have a go, so we're all benefitting from it. It has all the high-tech tricks (MIDI, USB etc.) as well so it can appeal to gadget freaks as well. Highly recommended.

matt
September 1, 2007

Rating: 10/10

the quality is amazing the stand is solid. every thing is in the rught place. you cannot go wrong if you pick the dgx 620 10 / 10 nice one yamaha

Jamie Ayres
December 13, 2006

Rating: 10/10

After months of looking for a stage piano to gig with I was left with a couple of disturbing choices on the \'new model\' market place... a black beast with barely any sounds, no screen and a hefty price tag, or a black beast with a few more sounds and an even heftier price tag courtesy of Yamaha and Roland.

Then along came the DGX620.

I realise that this machine wasn\'t really designed for the road, but consider what I need it for - gigging in a covers band and regular use as an alternative to my accoustic piano at home. After having a fiddle with one at a local music shop I decided I had to bite the bullet. The black beasts mentioned earlier felt almost flimsy in comparison (and they were supposedly stage pianos!?) and the DGX620 has enough sounds to keep a covers band in fresh ideas for years! Plus it has a pitch bend wheel... bonus! :)

When it arrived I was amazed at how chunky and sturdy it feels. This thing is built to last, and has a solid metal bar that bolts onto the bottom of it to prevent any bend or sway if you\'re giving it a bit of welly. Once mounted on its wooden stand (or the metal stand I bought for gigging) I swear I\'ve felt more bendiness in some wooden accoustic pianos than I can feel in this thing!

The most important thing to a pianist (which I am at heart!) is the feel of the keys, and the DGX620 didn\'t let me down. I already knew I quite liked the feel of it from the twiddle I had in the shop, but there\'s nothing like bashing out some of your favourites on a keyboard for finding out if you made a wise choice. I altered the touch sensitivity (three settings from 1-soft, through 2-medium and 3-hard to off) and I was like a pig in poo (as the phrase almost goes). It is as close to a real piano as I have felt, with the top end returning quickly and easily for fast trills, swipes and arpegios and the bass notes clomping along with an assuring air about them. On the piano sounds the bass notes feel just like they play... with a deliberate sound and feel that\'s extremely gratifying.

Bringing us safely onto the sounds. This was one of my prime reasons for getting the DGX620... I needed plenty of sounds as well as an 88-key weighted keyboard. The 620 offers 139 voices within its instrument-specific range (the top ten are drum kits) while the inclusion of the XGLite selection brings this up to 500. The best of the sounds are the Live! (stereo reproductions of real instuments), Cool! and Sweet! sounds, all of which are fantastic. The pianos are purposeful and rewarding, the strings are rich and full and the organs are generally sublime. Possibly my favourite sound on the whole keyboard is the Suitcase Piano with its angry attack when you start to beat out an old Beatles number! Pure class! This would be followed by the Growl Sax... niiice!

However, as is expected there are some dodgy sounds (usual culripts being the leccy guitars), most of which appear in the XGLite section. Having said that, the keyboard\'s ability to layer two sounds together and adjust numerous things about each of the layered sounds (reverb, chorus/flange, volume, octave, etc) means that you can use the XGLite sounds to add flavour to any other sound, thus making them far more useful than they would be on their own.

Creating and saving these concoctions (which includes split points and split sounds) is a simple two stage process... create the new sound/dual/split/transpose combo, then prod three buttons to save the new sound into any one of 16 registries. My only slight gripe about this is that calling these sounds back in a hurry (ie, a live situation) is simple as long as you only want two sounds per song. Who uses more than that though? And if you do there\'s a good chance you could place one of the sounds into the split area of one of the other sounds.

The sounds are recreated adequately from the onboard speakers, but having played this keyboard in a few live situations through a large Peavey amp (I could live in it if the missus kicked me out!) I have to say that this thing really was built to perform in a bigger setting. It\'s well worth the effort of slapping it through a decent sound system if you have one.

The DGX620 also has a decent multi-track recorder, the famous YES learning system, is compatible with Yamaha\'s online music download systms and has numerous accompaniment abilities which even a seasoned pro might get some use out of, all of which I am unlikely to use since I\'m a trained pianist and only ever arrange music via my computer. That said, they are useful additions and help to make this an even greater all-rounder!

Finally, the negatives (and there aren\'t many). I didn\'t want the wooden stand and could have done with a few quid off the price. Why does Yamaha insist on selling people add-ons they don\'t want? It\'s well built though. The keyboard is going nowhere once it\'s sitting on its throne! No MIDI ports, only the USB, which isn\'t always 100% reliable! The screen is bright and clear (makes me glow blue in a darkened venue :o), but often tells you more than you need to know. I\'m slowly getting used to the layout but I do still find myself hunting for information. It could have done with a damping pedal input and the option to change the operation of the sus pedal (even my old PSR225 had that option :o) but with all of the plus points that this keyboard has I can\'t stress how immaterial these gripes really are.

Fantastic work Yamaha! A home keyboard at a decent price which I feel confident and proud to have on stage with me. :o)