The DGX-660 is the top portable keyboard for Yamaha. The DGX-660 is dubbed a “Portable Grand” and offers a complete 88-key keyboard with high-quality grand piano sounds as well as a range of other educational, efficiency and enjoyable characteristics.
In this review of Yamaha DGX-660, I will focus on the physical characteristics and links of the keyboard, how the keys feel from the point of perspective of a professional pianist, the quality and efficiency of his instrument library, and how to navigate and use its many characteristics.
Contents
Physical Traits
The DGX-660 is very portable compared to a nine-foot, 1000-pound acoustic grand piano. It is about 30 inches high, 55 inches broad, 17.5 inches deep, and 61 pounds with the included stand. Sure it’s a bit heavy and complicated, but you can readily be helped by a buddy or friends.
The instrument is an elegant black on the stand with synthetic wood grain.
The instrument and its stand will have to be installed when bought fresh. Assembly can be a little complex, so when placing the DGX-660 together, it is best to refer to the handbook. When a little shake was given, the floor model I tried felt durable and I’m sure the piano can manage non-rigorous transport for something like an open microphone coffee shop.
The keyboard also comes with a music rest that fits readily into the keyboard’s top corner slots. Remember, this instrument is classified as a portable keyboard, not a stage piano; it is not intended to be transferred as often as possible.
Connections and Ports
The DGX-660 is a flexible keyboard with multiple links and ports.
It is equipped with the typical DC in the energy port, a quarter-inch stereo output / headphone jack, a pedal support jack, an additional input (this is an excellent function I will explain later), and a quarter-inch microphone input.
Typically, microphone wires are XLR, so you’ll need either an adapter or a microphone with a quarter-inch male connection.
With DGX-660 it is possible to use a typical, damper pedal only, but more professional, three pedal devices can be connected, such as the Yamaha LP7A. For someone who is used to the pedal setup of an acoustic piano, this is more natural.
Pedals like the LP7A also have a half-damper feature that shifts the quantity of clarity on the resonance of the piano depending on how deeply you are pressing the damper button. It’s a wonderful characteristic!
How Does It Feel?
The DGX-660 is still considered a “portable keyboard,” so it’s not too surprising that it doesn’t match its “Portable Grand” specification.
The keys are plastic, but they still have some feeling of value. The piano has a Graded Hammer Standard keyboard that tries to reproduce from low to high the gradual heavy to light contact one would experience on an acoustic grand piano.
This characteristic was visible when I performed the piano, and I can appreciate, but it is not comparable with the finest weighted keyboards and pianos.
For me personally, the key’s mid-to-high-mid part retreat has an abnormal retreat that reminds me more of something like a semi-weighted keyboard. This doesn’t make quick recurring notes or very quick trills easier.
Overall, it’s not bad touch. It’s ideal for someone who might not be a severe piano pupil and performs more for pleasure and recreation. For beginners to read on, the DGX-660 could also be a nice digital piano.
The distinct rows of stage pianos and digital grand pianos from Yamaha may be more suitable for someone searching for a more genuine contact.
High-end electronic instruments like Yamaha or the Clavinova in the Arius range have more and more alternatives to give when it goes to key beds.
Instrument Options and Quality
The DGX-660 has 554 speech choices. The first is a distinctive collection of “Piano Room” piano sounds that is very different from the rest of the sound library of the keyboards. Use the “Piano Room” key to access it.
For those with more discerning ears, Yamaha wished to offer players a higher feeling of configurability and enjoyable. The virtual space can be selected from Concert, Recital, Stage, Room, or None “environment” choices.
Essentially these are kinds of reverbs from the biggest to the lowest. It is possible to choose four kinds of pianos, including Grand, Pop, Warm Grand, and Honky Tonk. Next, the “open” or “shut” flap location can be selected for all pianos except the Honkey Tonk.
There are many choices in the Piano Room at this stage, but Yamaha provides a little more configurability with a segment called “Detail” where you can choose the general tuning of the piano, what kind of touch reaction it has, and the damper resonance.
That said, in this environment there are a number of distinct piano sounds. Generally, the quality is fairly nice. I especially like the sound of the Warm Grand and believe it’s got the most genuine timbre. The reverbs are good, as are the flap position’s small nuances and the damper resonance.
I think the Pop piano is a bit too bright, but this kind of piano sound generally performs better in an ensemble environment because the piano can be heard and cut through more.
I didn’t like the Honky Tonk; this cheap sounding instrument patch can’t be saved by any quantity of reverb or other choices.
Besides the Piano Room, there is a collection of sounds that can be accessed when you first switch on the keyboard. The sounds of the proprietary tool are numbered 000-151.
Pianos, all kinds of keyboard instruments, guitars and basses, stringed instruments, brass and woodwinds are among others within these 152 sounds.
Overall the acoustic pianos were good, but “Live! Warm Grand” was my favorite. The electric pianos sounded great as did most of the organ patches.
Except for the classical guitar, the guitar patches were missing, but this is typical of all but the finest keyboard pianos.
The DGX-660 has a remarkable quantity of ensemble string patches with a nice quantity of variation, and many of these can be well mixed with other patches such as the pianos to produce a great sound.
However, the solo strings are some of the weakest in the collection. They are poorly incorporated and handled, and their sound is very small and uninspiring.
For distinct hits and other drastic sound effects, there are a nice number of patches. Actually, the vocal pads are also pretty good and would fit beautifully with the string and keyboard sounds. Both the woodwinds and the saxophones in particular were of small performance.
They sound very unnatural and have little or no reaction to varying speeds. The keyboard’s XGlite voices contain a lot of other instrument sound, but I don’t have time to go through them.
XGlite is an obsolete expansion of the midi protocol and impacts, but some of the instruments, especially idiophones such as xylophone, glockenspiel, marimba, etc… are really brilliant and sound fantastic.
Look beyond the DGX-660 if you’re searching for great device patch performance. Many of Yamaha’s top-level keyboards and workstations like the Motif row have much stronger instrumental components that can maintain their own in professional recording. Check our guide to the finest keyboard workstations for more data.
Features
If anything, there are many helpful characteristics in the DGX-660. Some of the normal characteristics that I have already suggested include being allowed to lay various buttons, as well as splitting the keyboard to have one portion of the keyboard playing one sound and the other side playing another.
The DGX-660 has a metronome like most keyboards, but it also has some excellent flexibility such as pressing the damper button in the tempo, altering the time signature, and adjusting whether the sound is a click or a bell. The DGX-660 readily performs these tasks and can be discovered in the handbook.
The DGX-660 requires other neat characteristics found on other keyboards adding harmony and backup accompaniment to improve your playing, but brings them to the next stage with characteristics such as the Style Recommender that selects the right style of accompaniment depending on the rhythm you perform.
With this keyboard, you can easily record these types of games as exciting multi-track documents as both audio and midi files.
Other characteristics on the DGX-660 include teaching tools for learning songs already on the keyboard or being transferred via USB. The music notation is shown on the display of the keyboard and three distinct “Waiting,” “Your Tempo” and “Minus One” features give distinct teaching rates.
In all sincerity, in my view, this is more of a gimmicky aspect. The screen isn’t very big and you’re going to have to look directly at the keyboard; it’s not very learning-friendly.
It might be fun for some of the DGX 660’s songs to see the chords and melodies, but not the best presentation. Similarly, the lyrics for famous tracks available are presented on the display using Yamaha’s XG song files for karaoke and play along.
Looking directly down may be a nice way to learn the music, but certainly not a nice performance time experience.
There are many other helpful characteristics on the DGX-660, but the capacity to link a microphone to the keyboard for an enhanced vocal output is one that sets it apart from others in Yamaha’s portable digital piano range.
Before switching on, plug a dynamic microphone into the keyboard and turn the volume all the way down. There are three presets of vocal effects that include dynamic processing and can be edited based on your vocal style and needs. In this function, Yamaha wants startling details! Yamaha DGX-660 Digital Grand Piano
For my review, I was unable to check this last function, but the DGX-660 can also be used with wireless systems such as tablets and smartphones capable of transmitting audio and midi information between phone and keyboard.
For my review, I was unable to check this last function, but the DGX-660 can also be used with wireless systems such as tablets and smartphones capable of transmitting audio and midi information between phone and keyboard.
Overview
The DGX-660 is a general excellent instrument, one of the finest digital pianos under $1000 can really be called. It looks wonderful and is well constructed, has a lot of features, excellent piano sounds as well as other tool sounds, and with its wireless connectivity it has some excellent forward looking facilities.
Some disadvantages are its general keyboard feel, some very unimpressive sounds in its sound bank, and the number of features is a bit overwhelming and difficult to navigate.
Consumers should remember that this keyboard is somewhere between a stage piano and a digital piano with some unique features that are added and they don’t assume too much.
