Hi! Finally made some time to do some exploration of my Yamaha MX49 Synthesiser though I’ve had it for a while and I’ve only been able to make some time now for a thorough examination of the keyboard.
Put frankly the MX49 is nothing startling as far as keyboards go but for $750 retail it offers someone who doesn’t want to spend a huge amount of money on a keyboard a full repository of voices and realistic sound. I bought the keyboard for use with my Apple Mac Mini and Garage band, I’ve not done anything in this area yet but I do plan to, I just wanted to play around with the keyboard to see what I could get out of the synth. The first thing a user has to remember about the MX49 is that the unit doesn’t come with internal speakers and this suited me just fine, I’d rather good quality speakers and I have quite a few of those. By default the MX49 doesn’t save settings you make so you can use this to your advantage, find yourself tied up in knots just because you pressed a button and you wanted to see what happened? No fear, turn the synth off and then on again, you’ll be back with your factory defaults. This setting can be changed somehow and that still awaits my future exploration. By default the MX49 starts with a pleasant sounding piano which is real enough, you can control the sustain amongst other things using a series of knobs and wheels on the top of the unit, a jog-dial takes you through the series of voices you’ve selected, I managed to find the pipe/church/theatre organ groups and was able to activate the Lesily Speaker effects, I could hear where that wonderful organ sound for Dire Straights’s Brothers In Arms track came from, obviously not from exactly the same synth as mine but I’m willing to bet it was some sort of Yamaha synth. Anyway, enough for now and far more to come.
