You bring up an interesting point about basic design philosophy.You might argue that this was a "quirky" decision for Yamaha to take (I.e. not facilitating their use as MIDI Controllers). However, all considered, the complexity of the MODX/Montage likely influenced their decision to partition them away from MIDI Control, and keep them as strictly 1 to 1 function, dedicated hardware controls.
In short... if they were MIDI Controllers, Users would never know, or forget, or not realise what they were controlling in Live performance. It would create more problems than it would solve.
On a Kurzweil (PC4 and similar), there are lots of controls, but most controls are completely programmable, so the user can make each control do whatever they want, total flexibility, but also some related complexity.
On a Nord, there are also lots of controls, but basically every slider, knob, and button is dedicated to a particular function (or pair of functions, since many have secondary "shift" functions). No flexibility, but you always know what each control is going to do. And each control is placed and labeled logically for its dedicated function. (They got away from this just a little on the Stage 4, where there are 3 multipurpose synth knobs, but even those are accompanied by a dedicated display right above the knobs, that always tells you what the three knobs will do.)
MODX/Montage makes some attempt to split the difference. The knobs on the top left are multi-purpose and assignable; the sliders are dedicated-function (well, toggle-able between part and element), and non-assignable.
Fantom also takes a kind of hybrid approach. There are basically dedicated synth controls on the right, context-sensitive multi-purpose controls beneath the screen, and then the sliders/knobs on the right which can be toggled between a dedicated vs. assignable mode.
With Kronos gone, Korg basically avoids the dichotomy of dedicated vs. programmable controls, by giving you almost no real-time controls at all.
Statistics: Posted by anotherscott — Sat Feb 24, 2024 9:45 pm