August 30, 2008

Rating: 10/10

This machine has blown me out of the proverbial water! WOW!!I can honestly say there is nothing I would change, even if I had been on the design team. I currently have it plugged into Sonar 7 PE and it is out-performing my wildest expectations and that\'s saying something for this skunky little audiophile! The sounds are what you would expect from a MUCH more expensive machine and I LOVE the pale timber finish...it smacks of Quality and I strongly encourage anyone looking for a blistering bargain to wend your way to your nearest Yamaha Music Centre...but be warned, you\'ll need several valium and a box of tissues to wipe up the drool!

August 19, 2008

Rating: 7/10

I was a bit skeptical when Yamaha announced their new DGX model. Most of the time yamaha offer a replacement for a model increase the price by £100 and make minimal if no changes. I will compare with the 620 later.

The facts: The DGX-630 is a recently released portable Digital Piano. The Yamaha DGX-630 is a 88-key weighted graded hammer action portable keyboard this is great giving you a high variation and like a traditional acoustic piano, the lower keys on the Yamaha DGX630 have a heavier touch while the higher keys are more responsive to lighter playing, this is a great touch and not to be underrated giving a real piano feel when you are trying it out.

The DGX630 keyboard further can be adjusted to suit your playing style. Improvements on the earlier Yamaha DGX-530 digital piano include 64-note polyphony, a beautiful matching bench and an Optional three-pedal unit, along with additional DSP Digital Signal Processing effects that can be added to the Main and Dual voices to enable realistic sounding Distortion Guitar and Rotary Organ. I do have a complaint that you have to pay extra for the pedal unit when many cheaper alternatives can easily be found.

The Yamaha DGX-630 digital grand piano also offers USB MIDI and USB to Device for removable flash memory storage, I have not tried this however have tried it with logic and found no complaints.

Further improvements include a grand stereo sample, song recorder, score and lyric display.

Aside from each song\'s default style, the Yamaha DGX630 keyboard\'s Easy Song Arranger allows you to select other styles to play a song. Create different arrangements by changing the song\'s style, or change the song\'s melody voice and keyboard voice for a total change of image. TheYamaha DGX630\'s Performance Asistant Technology even corrects your performance bloopers.

The Yamaha DGX-630 digital grand piano offers an affordable, feature-packed portable keyboard with authentic grand piano, amazingly responsive throughout. A single Portable Grand Button sets the Yamaha DGX630 to an authentic sounding grand piano however continues to have the flexibility of different sounds and feels. Altogether this is a great keyboard.

The Yanaha Education Suite built into the Yamaha DGX630 digital grand piano is a set of piano lessions in easy steps. Learn to read music with the Yamaha DGX630 keyboard\'s Music Notation Disply which shows the corresponding score as a song plays. If the song contains lyric and chord data, these wil also appear in the score display.

The differences between its predecessor (i.e. DGX-620) is minimal at best and if you can you might as well go for the cheaper, nevertheless, the 64-note polyphony of the DGX-630/YPG-635 is a welcome change for one of Yamaha\'s cheaper brands..