Yamaha MONTAGE vs Roland FANTOM: Deep Dive

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Once your studio has its fair share of boutique, analog and modular synths that you love to tinker with, and your virtual instrument collection is brimming, you may find yourself considering a multi-timbral hardware synth that can provide your bread and butter sounds, but also be a great instrument in its own right.

You’ve narrowed your selection to Roland FANTOM and Yamaha MONTAGE, because you’ve heard that both can be a great centrepiece to a studio, or for a live rig.

So which is better?

There are a number of videos online on this subject, but they tend to focus on a fairly shallow review of which sounds better, rather than what these instruments are actually like to work with.

I’ve owned both of these synths for several years, and I think that there are some important differences between them that tend not to get discussed in enough detail, so I have produced a video to do just that.

Although my video compares the original 2017 MONTAGE with the 2019 FANTOM, both of which are now discontinued, the video deals with design principles and architecture differences, so the comparison is equally applicable to the other synthesisers in each family, namely the Yamaha MONTAGE M, MODX and MODX+, and the Roland FANTOM EX and FANTOM 0 series series.

This is a long and detailed video, so set aside some time to watch it to the end, and you may find that you even learn something you didn't already know about these two great systems.

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