OVERVIEW
The first thing you notice about the MM6 is how incredibly light it is, weighing in at a hair over 11 pounds. The plastic construction might not stand up to daily abuse on the road, but it sure makes the keyboard easy to carry to weekend gigs and recording sessions in a pal’s home studio. Similarly, the keyboard action doesn’t have the solid feel of pricier synths such as Yamaha’s own Motifs, but it’s perfectly serviceable.
The MM6’s uniquely sleek shape resembles a stealth aircraft. The keyboard is velocity-sensitive, but lacks aftertouch. Pitchbend and modulation wheels are included, as well as dedicated knobs for filter and volume envelope control. The controls are easily readable, and all the buttons have a nice rubbery surface. Taking the “category” method of sound selection one step further are dedicated buttons for many common sound categories. An eight-track onboard sequencer rounds out the package.
SOUNDS AND EDITING
The quality of the sounds here contrast with the entry-level appearance of the MM6, which is not surprising, given that they’re derived from both the Motif ES and “classic.” Most of the acoustic pianos were a little dark for my tastes, but the Rhodes and Wurly electric pianos sounded very authentic. There are several spitty, vibey organs, with fixed rotary speaker effects (i.e. they’re part of the sample itself) and the mod wheel adding conventional vibrato. The MM6 delivers plenty of other great sounds, such as the famous Yamaha acoustic guitars, plenty of fat synth leads and basses, plus impressive strings and brass. The “synth lead/pad” category offers lots of techno-oriented leads as well as some huge analog pads. The mass of sound coming out of this little keyboard is often surprising! Drum kits run the gamut from vintage analog beat boxes (think Roland TR-808 and 909), to house, dirty garage, and more straight ahead rock and R&B styles. It’s hard to put my finger on, but all the drum sounds had just a bit of grit to them that served up a little extra impact and punch.
Though the MM6 is primarily a preset-based instrument, you can edit some basic sound parameters. Four front-panel knobs let you tweak what are likely the four “most wanted” settings: filter cutoff and resonance, and volume envelope attack and release. Chorus, reverb, EQ, and a selectable DSP effect may be assigned and saved as well, but the effects themselves are preset. With a split or layer, you can edit how much of each sound gets sent to each effect, but that’s about it. This limitation is offset, though, by the sheer variety of onboard effect presets. You can store these settings in 64 performance memories, which are also where you store splits and layers, as well as accompaniment rhythm pattern and arpeggio settings, which we’ll get into in a moment.
IN USE
Like many other aspects of the MM6, the single arpeggiator is a preset-based affair, with 213 different patterns covering everything from basic up-and-down riffs to complex, polyphonic variations that, true to the Motif line’s sophistication in this area, are better described as phrase sequences than as mere arpeggios. Additionally, many pattern names contain prefixes directing the user to appropriate sounds. This is most evident in the drum “arpeggios” that offer instant beats with drum presets.
In the home-organ-of-doom realm, the MM6 has 168 built-in rhythms, each with four variations. But that’s not all, folks! Each rhythm includes a stylistically appropriate chord and bass accompaniment pattern that can track right hand chords or left hand bass notes. While they don’t offer as many realtime variations as full-on arranger keyboards like Yamaha’s PSR-3000 (see page 20), the patterns are generally pretty hip, covering a whole lot of ground from rock to R&B to hip-hop, and quite adeptly at that. Yamaha has kindly thrown in Turkish and Oriental pop styles as well as some cool Indian tabla beats. One could really get into trouble here . . . the good kind, that is.
There’s an eight-track sequencer onboard as well, with a ninth track dedicated to rhythm patterns. It’s clearly intended as a musical sketchpad, as its functions are very basic: There’s no quantizing, cut-and-paste editing, or loop mode, just straight-up linear recording. I suspect this is precisely why Yamaha tosses in a Mac- and PC-compatible copy of Steinberg Cubase LE on an included CD-ROM should you want to do more advanced songwriting and arranging.
Yamaha generously includes two USB ports. One accepts standard USB storage devices, allowing backup of all internal data as well as direct playback of Standard MIDI files right from the device. I downloaded a pretty wicked SMF of the Village People’s “In The Navy,” and playback was as simple as saving to my USB flash drive, popping it into the MM6, and pressing play. The second USB port is for MIDI communication with your Mac or PC. You do need to download the correct driver from Yamaha’s website, but the download and installation process was quick and hassle-free, and once installed, MIDI worked perfectly with Apple Logic Pro.
CONCLUSIONS
The MM6 occupies a unique niche. It succeeds in bringing the sound quality of the pricier Motifs to the more casual or novice player, and is clearly aimed at those don’t want to spend a lot of time dealing with the nooks and crannies of a deeper workstation. Though it’s easy for some “pros” to turn up their noses at the accompaniment features, it only takes a couple of seconds to realize that you can quickly create a heck of a lot of music this way. This could prove highly valuable for singer-songwriter types who like to work fast.
Comparing likely competition in this price range, the Korg X50 ($899) and Roland Juno-D ($749) both have about double the polyphony and are a little more professionally oriented in terms of their synth feature sets, but they’re also more intimidating to the beginning user. More importantly, neither have any multitrack sequencer onboard, as compared with the MM6’s basic but functional sketchpad. For ease of use and heavy sounds at a light price, the Yamaha MM6 accomplishes its goals with aplomb.