About that Montage discontinued thread...

[keynote]

I may have jumped the gun on the announcement the Yamaha Montage was discontinued. I heard it was discontinued from a person over at the Yamaha Synth dot com forum. He got the information from an employee at Long & McQuade up in Canada. When I read the post I went ahead and looked all over the internet at different online music equipment retailers and sure enough it was difficult to find any Montage in stock, especially the 88/76 key versions. But I noticed when I scoured the internet today more online establishments actually now have the Montage in stock including the 88/76 key versions. So I apologize for being quick on the draw i.e. shoot and ask questions later, without verifying and confirming through better, more reliable sources.

That said; here's what I think could be released at NAMM 2023 instead. Yamaha has been interested in releasing a full-blown synthesizer like the ones from the glory years of the 70s/80s. Yamaha even asked Yamaha keyboard owners what they would like to see in a synth from Yamaha. Yamaha even mentioned the CS-80 from yesteryear that could potentially be modernized for the 21st century and being more feature-packed with mind-blowing sound capability with MIDI 2.0 implementation, which would be a bonus. We have recently heard about Yamaha trademarking the AN1-X analog synthesizer 'technology' (if that's the right word) so with that in mind I'm leaning more toward a traditional synthesizer from Yammie that could possibly be released at NAMM. Regarding the Montage, I think Yamaha may have had some trouble obtaining certain parts for the Montage and that may have been why the Montage was in very short supply up until just a few days ago, perhaps. Yamaha's press release on March 1st, 2023 mentioned a 'synthesizer' being released at the NAMM trade show, so perhaps instead of a new Montage+ or whatever, Yamaha might surprise us with a brand spanking new analog Synth at NAMM. Some might say, the new CK61/88 could be the synthesizer, but it was released a few weeks ago and Yamaha said that a synthesizer product would be released at NAMM. Many new Synths have recently been released during last year and early this year such as the Groove Synthesis 3rd Wave synth, the Oberheim OB-X8 synth, the ASM Hydra synth Deluxe 61key, and the Behringer UB-Xa synth that was announced but has yet to make it to market, etc., etc. Yamaha probably wants a piece of the action too, but we'll see. NAMM is now less than three weeks away and the excitement continues to build.

All the best, Mike