Yamaha DJX Keyboard

Yamaha DJX Keyboard

Music to your ears?

For a long time now, Yamaha have been synonymous with very high quality audio products for the professional user and absolutely top notch sound gear for the home user. More recently the sudden growth in dance music has meant that even more now than ever, home users too are hoping to "get their hands dirty" so to speak and have a go at this music making business. In answer to this, Yamaha have put some of their very latest and highest specification audio synthesis and sequencing hardware into a neat little package (see above and below pictures) and stuck an incredibly low price tag of £269 onto it!. This may seem underpriced for a keyboard with such high hopes but as you will find out this natty piece of kit is definitely worth more than the sum of its parts...

The obtrusively large package arrived one rainy Thursday morning attached to an annoyed looking courier. There was an immediate movement around the office as everyone suddenly woke up to see the contents of the box. I, being the boss and general head person, chose to open the box and was confronted with a relatively heavy but complex looking piece of kit with the DJX logo engraved into its surface. "It's a keyboard!" came the cry from someone behind me. "You're fired!!!" came the reply from me. The immediate surprise was the lack of an AC adapter which, after consulting the instruction manual, was found to be an optional extra!. This problem is solved in one of three ways:

    Buy a power adapter...
    Buy a stupid amount of batteries which will be drained in a matter of minutes.
    Use one of your own power adapters, "at your own risk".

We chose option 4, the unlisted option only available to very influential online media journalists. You guessed it!, we blagged one from Yamaha. Once set up, the keyboard was ready to roll. Before I go any further, I know you tech heads out there are waiting in anticipation of the technical specifications. The best place to go for these is the Yamaha website.

The first thing you notice when you switch the unit on is the sudden burst of animated antics on the generously sized LCD screen and then, as you tap one of the keys, you are greeted not with the usual calm piano sound of many similar keyboards but by some heavy 160bpm dance bass heavy action. You immediately realise that the speakers on this thing are absolutely stunning and can deliver extremely crisp and undistorted audio up to some ear wrenchingly loud volumes. It also comes to your attention that there are a large variety of buttons switches and dials to fiddle with! (simple things -ed). Contrary to most pieces of electronics aimed at the home user market, the dials, switches and buttons on the DJX are all of use to you and essential to be able to get the most out of the unit.

There are a large number of sounds built into the keyboard. 283 in total with 168 specific to the keyboard itself the rest being General MIDI sounds plus 1 sound bank for user use. You also find at this stage that the quality of the sampled instruments, kits and effects is quite superb and comparable easily with many of the much more pricey units on sale currently. All these sounds can be tinkered and tailored to suit your own styles and requirements via a series of detailed menus available via the buttons placed around the main display.

You also find the assortment of provided songs and music styles. These are all of the "dance" and "r&b" genre and range in style from classic dance, through trance, hardcore, jungle all the way to even fringe and abstract beats. Mostly, these tracks are of a high quality and also come with their own loops, synchs, patterns etc...

The "DJ" facilities on this keyboard are fairly unique to a consumer end machine. Accurate control of tempo, bpm, and pitch are achieved either numerically or by using the dials, pitch wheel and ribbon controller. Control of the "groove" and "track" of the song are also available by similar methods. Many effects and digital sound adjustments are available such as flange, chorus, reverb and the suchlike. These are all again of an exceptionally high quality and available in a variety of styles an genres. User samples can also be imported to the keyboard via the mic and line-in ports to the rear. A total of ~6 seconds of audio can be recorded onto the unit from outside and then fiddled with to the users content. In a matter of minutes you are able to create some fairly decent sounding dance tracks and mixing them with others in realtime, cool eh?

One important feature of many modern keyboards is the ability to connect directly with computers or midi interfaces. This ability combined with high level of professional features within this keyboard ensure a high level of functionality which amateurs and advanced users will be impressed with. We had it connected to our test computer and ready to run in a matter of minutes. We tested using standard windows media player, cubase and cakewalk and in all circumstances the keyboard performed exceptionally well.

The keyboard has some interesting recording features as well allowing you to pre-set your own songs and styles. This is very handy for live performances or for or complex pieces since you can set the keyboard up exactly how you want it in a high level of detail. For example, if you want to change the DSP effect from chorus2 to symphony half way through your performance, you can pre-set the unit to do just that. Overall I can safely say that we were suitably impressed with this keyboard. It looks good, plays well and well deserves the ISR WOW! award!