Don’t be shy. Tell it like it is. Having synthesisers is like having that rocket ship that you really wanted to pilot when you were a kid. Your own Death Star pew pew. And the more fiddles and doodads the better. Look at this one. Got fiddles and doodads up the wazoo. To be honest as I get older I find it harder to take in a thing this big. By the time I have learned the right hand side I’ve forgotten the stuff on the left. Fortunate for me this was only a short loaner so I can pretend that I needed more time.
To a large extent this is a box full of onstage solutions already set in place. You want Honky Tonk #3 and there it is. There are many ways to alter Honky Tonk #3, one of which is the big blue knob which you can use to move many smaller knobs at the one time. For a person that is able to play a real piano this is wonderful thing. Not me, I wanted to see how closely this resembles Steinberg’s Halion software which at first blush looks to be similar.
The software editor for the Montage is in fact a fully working VST of the physical keys. You can work on the sound on the computer without having to pass it back to the hardware, which acts like an enormous dongle. No keys – no software.
Even though I’ve explored Halion I didn’t get that far with the Montage. Halion is a modular thing, with lots of synthesiser types you can stack up – it includes more things like spectral oscillators. You can make a small sample based instrument or go for exotic layers of synthesis. Montage’s VST is a more detailed version of the hardware which is mostly about loading up a preset and tweaking it towards your wishes. Sonically similar – culturally different.
So I really wouldn’t swap one for the other. Know whether you are a player or tweaker. Choose your spacecraft accordingly.