Yamaha REFACE CP Portable Electric Piano and Vintage Keyboard Sound Engine, Synthesizer

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Pros: Lightweight, easy to understand and to use (very user friendly), delivers excellent sounds in such a small format. The sound of the B-3 is universally known, but unless you’re a die-hard organ nerd, it can be confusing to recognize each transistor organ’s defining sonics, so here are a few musical references for each. The Hammond’s percussion also operates in single trigger mode, so playing legato doesn’t retrigger the attack.

Yamaha reface CP Electric Piano | PMT Online

While its personality doesn’t change in the context of different presets, it’s rich, spacious, and wide, with a smidgen of animation.

Finally, the effect processors both have a selection of distortion, touch-wah, chorus, flanger, phaser, delay or reverb. Cons: Probably the only one would be the three octaves, but this can be solve with an external midi keyboard.

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Each can contain a selection of effects including wah-wah, flanger, phaser, chorus, delay, reverb, and distortion. I don't have an 88-key piano and I probably never will because my need for piano is not as pressing as my need for modules and small instruments with the exact sounds I need. In the Reface DX, each operator includes its own discrete feedback loop, which can skew the sine wave incrementally toward either a sawtooth or square. The reface Owner’s Manual, in the reface CP Voice Setting Examples section, provides examples of combinations of effects settings useful with different instrument models to recreate vintage keyboard sounds.

The way I see it it really doesn’t matter, lots of critics are paid in some way to review any product.

Yamaha Reface CP Compact Electric Piano - Andertons Music Co.

With so many four-operator FM synths hitting in the same decade, their sound became a mainstay of the then-nascent dance music scene. If you’re really hung up on it, I suppose you could use a full-sized board to control your Reface via MIDI, but it seems like a lot of work that ultimately isn’t necessary. By reimagining the old school DX into a modern form factor, you’ve got THE sound of the ’80s, sure, but with a modern twist.There are 12 preset FM algorithms, which are more than enough to cover all but the most intricate design maneuvers.

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We understand the importance of online privacy and are committed to complying with the EU General Data Protection Regulation. Here the controls are neat and plentiful, a row of smooth, well-balanced sliders ideal for speedy programming — a concept heavily associated with the polyphonic CS models. To take one example, flicking is described as ‘sudden quick movements along a slider’ — the flick speed is proportional to the value incremented. A function common to all is the octave slider, providing two octaves of transposition in either direction for the mini keyboard and having no purpose at all when you’re playing via MIDI.

I’m not convinced these are better than physical sliders would have been, but Yamaha provide instructions on the various techniques for getting the best from them: ie. The dedicated pitch envelope also follows this model, allowing for wild digital swoops when applied to just one or two of the operators (instead of all four). It’s interesting that, in this implementation of FM, you can set individual feedback amounts for each operator. Every effect has two significant parameters to tweak, all of which contributes useful sweetening, thickening or dirtying qualities without drowning you in complexity. So the CP’s on-board tones include clavinet, early and late ’70s tine electrics, toy piano and of course the CP80 electric grand (recreated here with surprising authenticity).